>...Porter goes on to discuss Bortkiewicz's more >interesting work on such things as the incidence of death from mule kicks >among Prussian soldiers. At least, as statistician Bortkiewicz was concerned with *real*, *observable* though rare phenomena. As "Marxist", he clearly preferred the static/ecstatic contemplation of theoretical entities such the "system of values" and the "system of prices". Julian, thanks for the reference. I think Keynes also mentions this. Maybe you can check his Treatise on Probability which I browsed in the National Library in Rome many years ago. I vaguely recall that Bortkiewicz called the distribution of such events as the "law of small numbers". A.R.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 30 2000 - 00:00:04 EST