英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(4)（在线收听）

In the second half of the 17th century, in the aftermath of prolonged and bloody conflicts, European rulers adopted an entirely new perspective on the task of government, focused upon demographic trends – an approach made possible by the birth of modern statistics. Since ancient times, censuses had been used to track population size, but these were costly and laborious to carry out and focused on citizens who were considered politically important (property-owning men), rather than society as a whole. Statistics offered something quite different, transforming the nature of politics in the process.

17世纪下半叶，在长期血腥冲突的余波中，欧洲统治者对政府的任务采取了一种全新的视角，关注人口趋势——现代统计学的诞生使这种方法成为可能。从古代起，人口普查就被用来追踪人口规模，但进行这些普查既昂贵又费力，而且只关注那些被认为具有政治重要性的公民(拥有财产的男人)，而不是整个社会。统计数据提供了一些完全不同的东西，在这个过程中改变了政治的性质。

Statistics were designed to give an understanding of a population in its entirety, rather than simply to pinpoint strategically valuable sources of power and wealth. In the early days, this didn't always involve producing numbers. In Germany, for example (from where we get the term Statistik) the challenge was to map disparate customs, institutions and laws across an empire of hundreds of micro-states. What characterised this knowledge as statistical was its holistic nature: it aimed to produce a picture of the nation as a whole. Statistics would do for populations what cartography did for territory.

统计数据的目的是让人们了解整个人口，而不是简单地指出具有战略价值的权力和财富来源。在早期，这并不总是涉及生产数字。以德国为例(“统计学家”一词由此而来)，在这个由数百个微小国家组成的帝国中，要绘制出不同的习俗、制度和法律的地图是一项挑战。这种统计知识的特点在于它的整体性：它旨在描绘整个国家的面貌。统计对人口的作用就像制图对领土的作用一样。

Equally significant was the inspiration of the natural sciences. Thanks to standardised measures and mathematical techniques, statistical knowledge could be presented as objective, in much the same way as astronomy. Pioneering English demographers such as William Petty and John Graunt adapted mathematical techniques to estimate population changes, for which they were hired by Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.

同样重要的是自然科学的灵感。由于标准化的措施和数学技术，统计知识可以被客观地呈现出来，就像天文学一样。英国的人口学家先驱，比如威廉·佩蒂和约翰·格罗尔特，曾被奥利弗·克伦威尔和查尔斯二世雇用，采用数学技术来估计人口变化。