Factors in the Accumulation of Social Statistics
ANALYSIS of the factors determining the stock of social statistics may A be facilitated if we first formulate some general statements concerning changes in the stock itself. The appropriate viewpoint is, of course, that of the student of society. Let us, therefore, refer here to publicly available summary observations. Data reposing in private files or published only in the form of endless detail on individual economic transactions or units, like individual wholesale prices or lists of employees of state and local governments, may be processed into additions to the stock, but until this is done do not form part of it. What has happened to the volume of social statistics in the United States during the past 160 years? The following conclusions will all seem pretty obvious to statisticians, though they are not less significant on that account. (1) There has been a vast and fairly continuous expansion in the stock of social statistics. There are no simple measures of this stock, nor, indeed, is the way to construct them obvious. Yet even a quick thumbing through of the Bureau of the Census' Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789-1945 (1949), should be sufficient to support our conclusion. Or one may compare the collection of time series in Fluctuations in American Business, 1790-1860 by W. B. Smith and A. H. Cole (1935) with such a collection on the recent period as the appendix to A. F. Burns' essay on "Economic Research and the Keynesian Thinking of Our Times" (26th Annual Report of the National Bureau of Economic Research, 1946). The former shows what we have on that period better than do contemporary compendiums like Adam Seybert's Statistical Annals (1818), since it includes many original statistics assembled by the authors; yet it seems skimpy compared with Burns' rich and easy sampler. And the wealth of "survey" data today stands in sharp contrast to the few samples of earlier decades. (2) Growth has occurred also in the annual accretion to the stock. More and more time series have been established to report contemporary events, and more and more historical series have been constructed from the fragmentary data of the past. The "time-period" index to Historical Statistics shows, approximately, the combined effect of both