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Statistics Comes of Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

R. H. Coats
R. H. Coats*
Affiliation:
Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Ottawa
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Extract

I who am about to address you, salute you as the seventh President of our Association—and the first statistician in that honourable office. Our Association is called “The Canadian Political Science Association”. I well remember how we boggled over that name, when the Association was a-borning twenty-odd years ago (characteristically in Boston); it was meant to designate the polyglot omnium gatherum which we remain—economists, sociologists, political scientists proper, publicists, statisticians. As to the last, it is the fact that in countries which can afford to organize their social sciences by species (which Canada cannot), the statisticians have always shown the way. The Royal Statistical Society of Great Britain celebrated her centenary the other day, and the American Statistical is celebrating hers to-morrow, years and years before their sisters. Even in Canada, a statistical association was born, gasped, and died before our own got on its feet. Thus, in all delicacy, speaking for my statistical confrères, we feel that after six political economists for president all in a row, it is fitting we were called up higher. In the twitter of the moment, we might even wonder if we are Cinderella, who from her ashes was once invited into the parlour. She came, you remember, in all meekness, with nothing of the kitchen fire in her eye, yet I feel sure in some consciousness of merit, for it was Cinderella who finally married the prince.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , August 1936 , pp. 269 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1936

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References

1 A study like Schultz's, Henry Statistical Laws of Demand and Supply (Chicago, 1928)Google Scholar opens a new field for specialization under which subjective factors will be treated not as explanations, but as something to be explained.

2 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. XCVIII, part iii, p. 520.Google Scholar

3 See the Clapham-Pigou controversy in the Economic Journal, 1922.

4 Persons, W. M., “Some Fundamental Concepts of Statistics” (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 03, 1923).Google Scholar

5 “The Conception of Statistics as a Technique” (Journal of the American Statistical Association, 06, 1920).Google Scholar

6 Most of these look to the smoothing of the business cycle, including statistics of local capital markets, short-term money, and a plurality of price indexes à la Carl Snyder.

7 “The higher races”, says Halford, “are using the resources of science to reduce the death rate of the inferior and the birth-rate of the superior.” Incidentally, to the socialists there is no “superior”—the average is the superior; but Fascism ranks the average human being with the average egg, nothing to be enthusiastic about—Nietzsche's “bungled and botched”. A stationary population would, of course, revolutionize many of our social, economic, and even moral (e.g., thrift) standards. Even to-day the man who saves to buy bonds may be the villain of the piece, transferring his purchasing power from consumers' goods to armaments or excessive industrial plant.

8 Bertrand Russell calls the story of Cain and Abel propaganda to show that shepherds are more virtuous than ploughmen. The antithesis persists. The numbers in field husbandry have declined in Canada due to mechanization, but this has not been true of animal husbandry. Hence, “rural” depopulation in Canada has not been “farm” depopulation, but mainly a dwindling in the crafts and industries of the hamlets and villages subsidiary to agriculture.

9 See Miss Helen Walker's paper at the 1935 meeting of the American Statistical Association.

10 God and the Astronomers.