The History of Vulgar Statistics

Timothy Stanley: I was very struck by your account of Frederick Hoffman's argument that black Americans are a poor insurance risk. And then the attack on that view by W.E.B. Du Bois. He says statistics originally had nothing to do with mathematics; it was about statecraft. Stanley: The danger is recreating or reinforcing systems that help perpetuate those forms of discrimination. But in some ways there's room for optimism, he says.