Science and Society: A Reflexive Approach to Official Statistics
3.3 Statistics and Society
3.3.2 The Co-construction of Statistics and Society—History in Fast Motion
3.3.2.3 Ideologies and Their Influence
An interesting feature in the history of statistics has to do with statistics and statis- ticians being children of their own time. What is important or unimportant, which questions are pursued scientifically or empirically, and which mental attitude or con- viction play a role in the work of a statistician, is generally not decided objectively, but bears the stamp of the historical episode. In the opposite direction, eminent scientists of statistics have also influenced the political events of their time.
A first example, which could highlight the mutual influence between ideologies and statisticians, is the case of ‘eugenics’:
The term ‘eugenics’ was coined by Sir Francis Galton in his 1883 book “Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development” and derives from the Greek ‘eu-genes’, meaning ‘well-born.’
There Galton defines eugenics as ‘the science of improving stock – not only by judicious mating, but whatever tends to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.… eugenics aims to use science for human improvement over generations by changing the composition of human populations through favouring the reproduction of certain sorts or kinds of people.
Although Galton characterized eugenics as itself a science, it was also a social movement, one that gained traction in many countries early in the 20th-century.44
42See, e.g.,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community.
43See the research project ‘Arithmus: peopling Europe: how data make a people’ (Goldsmiths2018).
44Robert A. Wilson in Eugenics Archives (Cassata2017).
In 1907, Karl Pearson became the first director of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, established at University College London (UCL).
In Italy, “anxieties over national regeneration, technocratic ambitions and new social welfare-oriented policies, which, after the war, accompanied the crisis of the last liberal governments and the progressive rise of fascism, favoured the affirmation of eugenics as a part of social medicine and public health. In this context, eugenics was progressively seen as a paradigm of national efficiency, based on the subordination of individual liberty to superior collective interests for the ‘defence of society and the race.’ leadership mirrored this ideological and political fusion: the president was the demographer and statistician Corrado Gini…” (Cassata2017).
The Eugenics Archive of Canada45allows an interactive study of the relationship between people, events and concepts in this important area, which is not very present nowadays (Fig.3.7).
Starting with Adolphe Quetelet (l’homme moyen) (Quetelet1835; Desrosières 2002), through Francis Galton and Karl Pearson (Porter2004) to Corrado Gini (Quine 1990; Horn1994), the undoubtedly creative intellectual elite of statistics in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century was rooted to an extent in an ideology that seems strange from today’s perspective.
A second instructive example of the interaction between ideologies, method devel- opment and statistical leaders is provided by the career of Rolf Wagenführ, who started in the 1920s his scientific way at Jena University with a thesis on Soviet
Fig. 3.7 Eugenics. Extract from interactive source Eugenicsarchive (2018)
45Seehttp://eugenicsarchive.ca/.
business-cycle theory and in 1933 with a study of Germany’s long-run industrial development (referring to Marx), to then turn to publications on issues of rearma- ment and military economics, being appointed as chief industrial statistician of the Institut für Konjunkturforschung in 1943 and further chief statistician in Speer’s Ministry for Armaments, in charge of the statistical information system for running the war economy in 1945. After the war, he remained a wanted man, first work- ing for the central command of the Soviet military administration of Germany, then
‘transferring’ to the US zone, where he worked for John Kenneth Galbraith’s Overall Economic Effects Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which assessed the economic effects of allied bombing during the war. In the late 1940s, he was chief statistician to the West German trade union federation before finally, in 1952, being placed in charge of the temporary statistical department of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), later first Director of Statistics for the European Community (EC) until 1966 (Tooze2001; Fremdling2016).
Although (or perhaps because) Rolf Wagenführ’s biography was marked with many dramatic twists, it may not be untypical of life histories of the time: influenced by ideologies and political currents and in turn influencing them.
The influence of ideologies on statistics, on method development and on statis- ticians has been reflected in a work of art by artist Arnold Dreyblatt, which can be seen in front of today’s ‘Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities’ in Oslo, Norway. The Centre has installed “Innocent Questions, an artwork by Arnold Dreyblatt in front of the building, which During World War II, was the home of the leader of Norway’s pro-Nazi puppet government” (Minorities2018). Nothing could better raise the question of the guilt or innocence of statistics46 than this simple sculpture of a punch card of population statistics (Dreyblatt and Blume2006).
The demographer William Seltzer contributed to the conception of this art object.
He concludes:
…statistics are important for governments, policy makers, and the people themselves. … Such data help in decision making, … and policy-oriented research. …Taken by themselves and in most circumstances, the collection of such information …involves ‘innocent questions’.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Particularly when information is also obtained that permits the identification of vulnerable population sub-groups through questions on race, religion, ethnicity … the results have sometimes been used by State or those in power to target vulnerable population subgroups for adverse action, including human rights abuses. … The point here is not to discourage the collection and use of population statistics. Rather, it is to remind us all … that we all carry a heavy obligation to ensure that our national statistical systems are not diverted from their legitimate purposes to the kind of misuse portrayed here. We all have a continuing responsibility to guard against such misuses(Seltzer2006, pp. 71–75) (Fig.3.8).
46See also (Wietog2003).
Fig. 3.8 Innocent Questions, Arnold Dreyblatt. Photos courtesy of the artist Arnold Dreyblatt