Statistics on the Table

by Stigler, Stephen M.

• ISBN13: 9780674009790
• ISBN10: 0674009797
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Stephen M. Stigler is Ernest DeWit Burton Distinguished Service Professor of Statistics at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(12)
I. Statistics and Social Science
Karl Pearson and the Cambridge Economists	13	(38)
The Average Man Is 168 Years Old	51	(15)
Jevons as Statistician	66	(14)
Jevons on the King-Davenant Law of Demand	80	(7)
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Statistician	87	(44)
II. Galtonian Ideas
Galton and Identification by Fingerprints	131	(10)
Stochastic Simulation in the Nineteenth Century	141	(16)
The History of Statistics in 1933	157	(16)
Regression toward the Mean	173	(16)
Statistical Concepts in Psychology	189	(14)
III. Some Seventeenth-Century Explorers
Apollo Mathematicus	203	(36)
The Dark Ages of Probability	239	(13)
John Craig and the Probability of History	252	(25)
IV. Questions of Discovery
Stigler's Law of Eponymy	277	(14)
Who Discovered Bayes's Theorem?	291	(11)
Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, and Maximum Likelihood	302	(18)
Gauss and the Invention of Least Squares	320	(12)
Cauchy and the Witch of Agnesi	332	(6)
Karl Pearson and Degrees of Freedom	338	(23)
V. Questions of Standards
Statistics and Standards	361	(22)
The Trial of the Pyx	383	(20)
Normative Terminology	403	(30)
W.H. Kruskal
References	433	(44)
Credits	477	(2)
Index	479