America by the Numbers by Emmanuel Didier

America by the Numbers by Emmanuel Didier

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,

Didier, Emmanuel: - Emmanuel Didier is a Full Professor at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs at ü¾Ž–Œ¼ cole Normale Supü¾Ž–Œ¼ rieure, Paris, and a member of the Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a founding member of EpiDaPo (Epigenetics, Data, Politics), initially a joint research unit of CNRS and UCLA. He taught at the University of Chicago and at UCLA and now teaches at Ecole Normale Supü¾Ž–Œ¼ rieure and Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique, both in Paris.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262538374
ISBN 10	0262538377
Title	America by the Numbers
Author	Emmanuel Didier
Series	Infrastructures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2020-04-07
Number of pages	432
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.