The Age of Moral Statistics

The place of moral statistics in the long history of the pricin gof progress is an ambiguous one. On one hand, moral statistics were clearly an important precursor to modern economic indicators. For the first time in American history, moral statistics succeeded in injecting quantiifed measures into everyday American discourse...In an age when traditional forms of social control...were quickly falling victim to industrialization, immigration, individualism, labor commodification, and democracy, moral statistics offered a new path. They showed American elites how statistics could step into such power vacuums and serve as tools not only of mass surveillance but of mass governance. On the othe rhand...the northern reformers who created them often also sought to quell disease, stamp out prostitution, and improve living conditions. While these statistics were far from innocent, at their heart nevertheless lay a vision that placed humanity, not money, at the center of society. In focusing on the human condition, these figures differentiated themselves from future economic indicators that would treat the American people as income-generating means to a wealth-accumulating end.
The rise of moral statistics, therefore, reflects the fact that money was not yet the central unit of social measure...during the Jacksonian era...Amerixan elites of the era preferred more concrete and corporeal measrues of progress, such as life expectancy and Sunday school attendnace, to the airy abstractions of exchange value (103-104).