A Brill Calendar: April 3

Early Data Gatherers

Few long-term evolutions are as crucial today as the steady growth in the amount of numerical information on socio-cultural processes that statistics document and deal with.

The augmentation of this symbolic presence (recalling the progress of snails), is an autonomous process, innate in learning. Statistical mathematics is born in the 17th century, whilst economics emancipates itself from ‘natural philosophy’ a century later, when the Scot Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) starts pondering the ‘Wealth of Nations’, published in 1776. What is called ‘data gathering’ in a digital era has few forebears before the Enlightenment and was unhurried in materializing.

In the ‘Great Recession’ at the dawn of this millennium, it is seldom taken into account by statesmen & politicians - or bankers & tycoons for that matter - that economic predicaments of individuals and their organizations in families, enterprises and regions during similar conditions could hardly be understood in earlier ages; Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ is a relatively young metaphor, generating a ‘novum’: economic science.

Charting the tradition, bibliographical serendipity finds remarkable men: like the Russian scholar Nicolai Kondratieff, born April 3 1892, founder of conjuncture studies in communist Moscow and ‘vanishing’ in Stalin’s terror before he was forty years old. The cyclic structure of economies that Kondratieff discerned is still studied eighty years later.

But since there is no presence without a past, Kondratieff is preceded: by the Frenchman Joseph Clément Juglar (October 19, 1819 – February 28, 1905; both in Paris); and the German sociologist Karl Marx, the first scholar who saw an economic crisis as a stage in a repetitive cycle. Juglar’s book on ‘crises commerciales’ in France, Great-Britain and the United States of America, published in 1862 and extended in 1889, is the hallmark in the scholarly awareness of the ‘Hard Times’ of popular imagination.