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The polar ice cap rapidly recedes; colonies of honeybees collapse
in alarming numbers; androgynous fish are detected in rivers and
streams. These reports not only describe recent events, but also
function as signs of an ominous and rapidly encroaching future. In
this issue of Limn we focus on how this future makes its appearance
in the present. Many of the threats we now find most
alarming-climate change, environmental radiation, emerging disease,
endocrine disrupters, toxic chemicals-are not immediately
perceptible to human senses. We rely on non-human indicators,
whether animals or detection devices, to alert us to their possible
onset. Such indicators can be thought of as sentinels, or heralds
of an approaching danger.
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."
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