Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods

Stephen M. Stigler

Harvard University Press | 2002 | 499 páginas | djvu | 5 Mb

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This lively collection of essays examines in witty detail the history of some of the concepts involved in bringing statistical argument "to the table," and some of the pitfalls that have been encountered. The topics range from seventeenth-century medicine and the circulation of blood, to the cause of the Great Depression and the effect of the California gold discoveries of 1848 upon price levels, to the determinations of the shape of the Earth and the speed of light, to the meter of Virgil's poetry and the prediction of the Second Coming of Christ. The title essay tells how the statistician Karl Pearson came to issue the challenge to put "statistics on the table" to the economists Marshall, Keynes, and Pigou in 1911. The 1911 dispute involved the effect of parental alcoholism upon children, but the challenge is general and timeless: important arguments require evidence, and quantitative evidence requires statistical evaluation. Some essays examine deep and subtle statistical ideas such as the aggregation and regression paradoxes; others tell of the origin of the Average Man and the evaluation of fingerprints as a forerunner of the use of DNA in forensic science. Several of the essays are entirely nontechnical; all examine statistical ideas with an ironic eye for their essence and what their history can tell us about current disputes.

Contents
Acknowledgments IX
Introduction 1
I. Statistics and Social Science
1 Karl Pearson and the Cambridge Economists 13
2 The Average Man Is 168 Years Old 51
3 Jevons as Statistician 66
4 Jevons on the King-Davenant Law of Demand 80
5 Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Statistician 87
II. Galtonian Ideas
6 Galton and Identification by Fingerprints 131
7 Stochastic Simulation in the Nineteenth Century 141
8 The History of Statistics in 1933 157
9 Regression toward the Mean 173
10 Statistical Concepts in Psychology 189
III. Some Seventeenth-Century Explorers
11 Apollo Mathematicus 203
12 The Dark Ages of Probability 239
13 John Craig and the Probability of History 252
IV Questions of Discovery
14 Stigler's Law of Eponymy 277
15 Who Discovered Bayes's Theorem? 291
16 Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, and Maximum Likelihood 302
17 Gauss and the Invention of Least Squares 320
18 Cauchy and the Witch of Agnesi 332
19 Karl Pearson and Degrees of Freedom 338
V Questions of Standards
20 Statistics and Standards
21 The Trial of the Pyx
22 Normative Terminology
with H. Kruskal