Why statistics tend not only to describe the world but to change it
Lorraine Daston, 13 April 2000
The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning
by Alain Desrosières, translated by Camille Naish.
Harvard, 368 pp., £27.95, October 1998,0 674 68932 1 Show More
by Alain Desrosières, translated by Camille Naish.
Harvard, 368 pp., £27.95, October 1998,
“... the same everywhere and always, statistical entities nonetheless change the world. They are, as Alain Desrosières puts it, ‘things that hold’. Desrosières’s book is a philosophical and sociological reflection on the history of statistics, the most matter-of-fact of all disciplines. He draws liberally on the ... ”
