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“He’s really showing that the modern state could not exist without the development of statistics, and vice versa. The evolution of statistics is triggered by the state. As the state needs more systems in place, statistics come to back it up. Econometrics, as an example, came together in the 1930s as a fusion of economics and statistics, and it was triggered by the American New Deal. Suddenly we had all these new programs that the Roosevelt administration was launching, and we had no way of gauging whether any of them worked. So suddenly economists and statisticians said, ‘Okay, we need new methods to see if when we give farmers a certain amount of money in a certain period of time, that leads to positive gains—or not.’ So Desrosières’s whole book is focused on that evolution, and he has an amazing number of historical examples. It’s one of those completely eye-opening works that is really special.” Read more...
The best books on Industrial Policy
Danny Crichton, Journalist
