“The newly mathematized statistics became a fetish in fields that wanted to be sciences. During the 1920s, when sociology was a young science, quantification was a way of claiming status, as it became also in economics, fresh from putting aside its old name of political economy, and in psychology, fresh from a separation from philosophy. In the 1920s and 1930s even the social anthropologists counted coconuts.”
Deirdre McCloskey, The Trouble with Mathematics and Statistics in Economics
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2013, September 30). The fetish of statistics [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/the-fetish-of-statistics/
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