America by the Numbers: Quantification, Democracy, and the Birth of National Statistics (Infrastructures)

How new techniques of quantification shaped the New Deal and American democracy. When the Great Depression struck, the US government lacked tools to assess the situation; there was no reliable way to gauge the unemployment rate, the number of unemployed, or how many families had abandoned their farms to become migrants. In America by the Numbers , Emmanuel Didier examines the development in the 1930s of one such tool: representative sampling. Didier describes and analyzes the work of New Deal agricultural economists and statisticians who traveled from farm to farm, in search of information that would be useful for planning by farmers and government agencies. Didier shows that their methods were not just simple enumeration; these new techniques of quantification shaped the New Deal and American democracy even as the New Deal shaped the evolution of statistical surveys. Didier explains how statisticians had to become detectives and anthropologists, searching for elements that would help them portray America as a whole. Representative surveys were one of the most effective instruments for their task. He examines pre-Depression survey techniques; the invention of the random sampling method and the development of the Master Sample; and the application of random sampling by employment experts to develop the "Trial Census of Unemployment." "This is a title in the Infrastructures series and it is a translation from the French (it was published in France by la Decouverte in 2009). It is a look at the infancy of agricultural and labor statistics in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. On the face of it, this seems like a dry topic, but it was written with an eye toward giving life and detail to the growth and development of statistics and quantification in the US. Didier shows that the data collected was used in very real wasy to help everyday Americans improve their livelihoods and forges a more cohesive American economy and identity. The author charts the National Agricultural Statistical Services (and successive government organizations such as the Bureau of Crop Estimates, the Division of Markets, etc.) early attempts at gathering and making sense of agricultural data. In his study, Didier links methods of surveying (and sampling the population) with different ideals of democracy and of public participation. Little has been said of the role agricultural surveys played in the shaping of statistics and survey data in the US-more attention has been paid to the urban side of this story. Ted Porter, who wrote the foreword, wrote of this book in his initial review: "One more very appealing dimension of this book is its friendly, close-to-the-ground presentation of the work of statisticians. He develops this material not as a theoretical working-out of general survey strategies, but as a series of practical tactics developed to deal with specific problems arising in the course of the work. This makes the book much more readable and interesting to someone not specifically devoted to statistical methodologies, and is also, in my view, more faithful to how things really unfolded."-- Provided by publisher