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To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation's consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right, and efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest during the 1930s. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the second world war, when governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government's competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.
想要認識統計數據是如何與國家進步的概念糾纏在一起的，不妨以GDP為例。GDP用一個數字表示，是對一個國家的消費支出、政府支出、投資和貿易平衡(出口減去進口)總和的估計。計算這個數字是極其困難的。在20世紀30年代，為之所付出的努力就像許多數學技術一樣，只是一種邊緣的、有點書呆子氣的興趣。直到第二次世界大戰時，各國政府需要知道全國人口是否有足夠的生產能力來維持戰爭，這個問題才被提升為國家政治上的緊急事項。在接下來的幾十年里，這個單一的指標盡管從來沒有遭到過批評，卻獲得了神圣的政治地位，成為了評判政府能力的終極晴雨表。GDP是上升還是下降，實際上已經成為社會前進還是后退的一個指標。
Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what this new science told us about what "women" or "Americans" or "manual labourers" thought about the world.
再以民意調查為例，民意調查是私營部門統計創新的早期例子。20世紀20年代間，統計學家發明了一些方法：在調查對象中確定一個具有代表性的樣本，以此來收集公眾的整體態度。這一突破最初被市場研究人員使用，之后不久民意調查由此衍生，這一行業也隨即成為公眾和政界關注的對象，因為這一新興科學向我們展示了“女性”、“美國人”或者“體力勞動者”對世界的看法，而媒體對此進行了報道。
Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins. It is only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy that we are so fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of "the public interest" is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
如今，民意調查的缺陷愈加顯露，一定程度上是因為人們從一開始便對投票寄予了厚望。只有在我們相信大眾民主的程度上，我們才會對公眾的想法如此著迷或關心。但在很大程度上，我們能夠了解公眾對具體問題的看法要歸功于統計數據而不是民主制度本身。我們低估了大眾的“公共利益”感來源于專家的計算而不是民主制度的程度。
