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Jewish World Review Jan. 23, 2001 / 28 Teves, 5761
Jeff Jacoby
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IF YOU'RE BLUE and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go to two engrossing new books, each brimming over with data about the extraordinary century just ended.
Ben Wattenberg, Theodore Caplow, and Louis Hicks open The First Measured Century : An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America 1900-2000 (paperback) and (hardcover) with the words of
James Garfield, who foresaw in 1869 that the new science of statistics was about to change the way history was written. "Till
recently," the future president said in a speech to the US House of Representatives, "the historian ... gave us only the story of
princes, dynasties, sieges, and battles.... Now, statistical inquiry leads him into the hovels, homes, workships, mines, fields, prisons,
hospitals, and all the other places where human nature displays its weakness and its strength."
It was a prescient insight. By the time the 20th century arrived, write Wattenberg, Caplow, and Hicks, Americans had become
"the most energetic measurers of social life that ever lived." Today few of us can imagine living in a society that doesn't routinely
take its own pulse -- keeping tabs on marriage rates and divorce rates, tracking the rise and fall of crime and poverty, compiling
data on everything from income to sports to sex.
Some of the 20th-century trends surveyed in The First Measured Century will be news to no one. Who doesn't know that
life expectancy is way up, that most Americans no longer live on farms but in suburbs, that nearly every home now has a
television? But others may surprise you.
True or false: (1) Parents spend more time with their children today than in the 1920s. (2) Income inequality is lower now than
it was early in the century. (3) Membership in churches is far higher now than it was at the start of the 20th century. Believe it
or not, all three are true.
Not every trend of the 20th century was a happy one, of course. Wattenberg & Co. make it clear that there has been bad
news to go with the good. Examples:
In their introduction, Moore and Simon offer a remind of how grim life in the 19th century could be. It was "an era of
tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, child death, horses, horse manure, candles, 12-hour workdays, Jim Crow laws,
tenements, slaughter houses, and outhouses," they write. "Lynchings were common occurrences back then, and not just of
blacks.... About 1 in 4 American children perished before the age of 14.... Industrial cities typically were enveloped in clouds of
black soot and smoke.... Streets were smelly and garbage-filled.... Deadly diseases were carried by milk and what then qualified
as 'drinking water.'"
It's Getting Better All The Timeargues that the human condition made greater advances in the past 100 years, especially
in the United States, than in all previous centuries combined. Moore and Simon make their case with what has to be the most
zestful and upbeat use of statistics ever gathered in one place: page after page of evidence that these are the good old days:
01/19/01: The real zealots
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