Nearly two thousand years have passed since a
census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part
of the greatest story every told. Many things have
Line changed in the intervening years. The hotel indus-
(5) try worries more about overbuilding than over-
crowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected
influx, few inns would have a manger to accom-
modate the weary guests. Now it is the census
taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that
(10) a highly mobile population will stay put long
enough to get a good sampling. Methods of gath-
ering, recording, and evaluating information have
presumably been improved a great deal. And
where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to
(15) obtain a simple head count as an adequate basis
for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated
statistical series furnished by governmental agen-
cies and private organizations are eagerly scanned
and interpreted by sages and seers to get a clue to
(20) future events. The Bible does not tell us how the
Roman census takers made out, and as regards
our more immediate concern, the reliability of
present-day economic forecasting, there are con-
siderable differences of opinion. They were aired
(25) at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the
American Statistical Association. There was the
thought that business forecasting might well be
on its way from an art to a science, and some
speakers talked about newfangled computers and
(30) high-falutin mathematical systems in terms of
excitement and endearment which we, at least in
our younger years when these things matter,
would have associated more readily with the
description of a fair maiden. But others pointed to
(35) the deplorable record of highly esteemed forecasts
and forecasters with a batting average below
that of the Mets, and the presidentelect of the
Association cautioned that "high powered statisti-
cal methods are usually in order where the facts
(40) are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of
what crude and inadequate statisticians assume."
We left this birthday party somewhere between
hope and despair and with the conviction, not
really newly acquired, that proper statistical
(45) methods applied to ascertainable facts have their
merits in economic forecasting as long as neither
forecaster nor public is deluded into mistaking the
delineation of probabilities and trends for a pre-
diction of certainties of mathematical exactitude.

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