The Life and Work of Carroll Davidson Wright: Fifth President of the American Statistical Association

Shaping Knowledge about American Labor: External Advising at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Twentieth Century

“…While hoping that American universities would adopt more favorable curricula, Wright opened his agency to those who wished to gain firsthand experience in statistical research. Numerous economists (including well-known figures like John R. Commons and Thomas S. Adams) worked as field agents or higher-level staff in the BLS; after Wright's death, the statistician Simon Newton Dexter North declared that the agency had “been a university for the education of experts in statistics, in sociology, in economics, and in industrial studies” (North 1909, 461; Grossman 1974, 23–72). But the low pay and lack of research freedom that characterized federal statistical operations kept these interactions briefer and less common than Wright would have liked: on the eve of the First World War, the economist Wesley C. Mitchell could still lament the split between “practical” and “mathematical” statisticians, the latter of whom failed to grasp the difficulties of field work (Mitchell 1915, 27, 80–81); a similar dynamic existed at the Census Bureau (Anderson 1988, 124–126).…”