For better or for worse, they placed human beings at the center of their calculating vision.
While these moral statistics were laden with paternalism, they nevertheless focused squarely on the physical, social, spiritual, and mental condition of the American people. Until the 1850s, in fact, by far the most popular and dominant form of social measurement in 19th-century America (as in Europe) were a collection of social indicators known then as “moral statistics,” which quantified such phenomena as prostitution, incarceration, literacy, crime, education, insanity, pauperism, life expectancy, and disease. Apparently, most Americans in the early republic did not see, count, or put a price on the world as he did. Hamilton was greatly disappointed by the paltry responses he received and had to give up on adding price statistics to his report. In 1791, then-Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wrote to various Americans across the country, asking them to calculate the moneymaking capacities of their farms, workshops, and families so that he could use that data to create economic indicators for his famous Report on Manufactures. The turn away from these statistics, and toward financial ones, means that rather than considering how economic developments could meet Americans’ needs, the default stance-in policy, business, and everyday life-is to assess whether individuals are meeting the exigencies of the economy.Īt the turn of the 19th century, it did not appear that financial metrics were going to define Americans’ concept of progress.
Today, well-being may seem hard to quantify in a nonmonetary way, but indeed other metrics-from incarceration rates to life expectancy-have held sway in the course of the country’s history. The Two Most Dismissive Words on the Internet Caleb Madison
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