Mickey Mouse Numbers in World History The Short View [Paperback]

A study of the miscalculations of the figures for world history employed by statistically-minded historians. It is the product, primarily, of the resources of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, aiming to show the great misuse of numbers and the fragility of the conclusions derived from them.Part 1 The sowers: the recorders - Porter, McCulloch and Macgregor, Michael G.Mulhall, B.R.Mitchell and William Woodruff, early demographers, world commerce and demography - the Woytinskys; governments and international institutions - the statistics of foreign countries before 1914 - Britain's Board of Trade, The League of Nations, The United Nations. Part 2 The reapers: the great generation - F.W.Taussig and Jacob Viner, the Stockholm Group and Gunnar Myrdal, Ragnar Nurkse, W.A.Lewis, Colin Clark, C.K.Hobson and A.H.Imlah, Simon Kuznets; the moderns - Paul Lamartine Yates, Alfred Maizels, Angus Maddison, Phyllis Deane and W.A.Cole, Paul Bairoch, generalists - S.B.Saul, A.J.Brown, H.Myint and L.J.Zimmerman; econometrics - the practitioners - Birnberg, Resnick and Hanson II, the professionals - Douglass C.North and Robert Paul Thomas, Irving B.Kravis and N.F.R.Crafts; the world system - Fernand Braudel, Arghiri Emmanuel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank.