The Dark Genius of John Graunt: “The Father of Modern Statistics.”
The Dark Genius of John Graunt: “The Father of Modern Statistics.”
By Paul Strathern | Published: 2025-01-07 14:00:00 | Source: The Past – Big Think
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
The father of modern statistics is widely acknowledged to be John Graunt, who was born in London in 1620. According to John Aubrey, whom he considered “my esteemed and worthy friend”, Graunt was “brought up (as was the fashion then) in the Puritan way”. He worked in the family haberdashery business, where he showed he had an “excellent head for business”. Business prospered to the point that by the age of twenty-one he was running his own shop specializing in lace buttons and collars. At the same time he was also appointed as a freeman to Drapers, the haberdashery guild to which he belonged.
As if that wasn’t enough, Graunt would also “get up early every morning to study before shopping time.” The field he chose to study was not only original, it was completely outside his scope. In this, Graunt’s life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the contemporary Dutch pioneer Antony van Leeuwenhoek. But while van Leeuwenhoek was a pioneer of microscopy, Graunt was a pioneer of statistics. Before starting work each morning, he began by copying details from the City of London’s obituary bills (i.e. death records). It has been suggested that his original motive for doing so was professional – as he was researching the range, ages and makeup of his living clients – although this seems unlikely. Either way, Graunt’s interests soon extended beyond these boundaries.
Collecting obituary bills was a relatively recent phenomenon. As the population of England became more urbanized, it was found necessary to collect details of these citizens for the purposes of taxation and military service. The first regular mortality bills for the City of London were compiled in 1603, the year of Queen Elizabeth I’s death, when there was an outbreak of plague. Weekly lists of the numbers of people who died were prepared, with the numbers classified according to various causes of death. Ironically, listing these causes of death brings life back to the city. Take for example a typical week’s menu:
Age: 13
Sunk: 8 (…four in St. Catherine’s Tower)
Evil: 3
Feathers: 60
French smallpox: 6
Abdominal pain: 134
Dajjal (Al-Kharaj): 6
Stopping in the stomach: 9
Teeth: 38
Wind: 3
Worms: 2
Other weeks include reasons such as “killed and shot,” “found dead in the streets,” “killed by multiple accidents,” and “stone and shrapnel.”
Graunt will publish his book Natural and Political Notes on London Mortality Bills In 1662, when he was forty-two years old. It contained his analysis of the laws of mortality using a “shop arithmetic”, which is much more creative than it appears. Mortality bills also included the numbers of all children baptized. Graunt took these baptism figures, along with death figures, to calculate the infant mortality rate before the age of six. First, he selected death categories that he knew included only infants or very young children—such as “stillborn,” “added and starved at the nurse,” and “infants”—and then grouped them together. He then used his observations and intuition, and calculated accordingly. For example, it was estimated that half of the deaths from smallpox and measles occurred among children under the age of six; Likewise, for one-third of plague deaths. From this he “concluded” that 36 per cent of all deaths in London were of children under six years of age. Taking advantage of the number of baptisms, he was then able to calculate the infant mortality rate. Armed with such numbers, he went on to calculate that “out of every 100 people born, 36 die before they reach the age of six, and seven of them live to the age of seventy.”
Graunt was well aware of the errors in the numbers he was dealing with. Few, except Descartes, began with such healthy skepticism regarding their basic data.
Graunt may have only used arithmetic in the shop, but it is no coincidence that he emerged as the first statistician. He was also able to estimate the size of an army that could be raised in London “assuming 107 males for every 100 females” (Graunt was the first to notice this discrepancy).
More tellingly, Graunt was also well aware of the inaccuracies in the numbers he was dealing with. Few, except Descartes, began with such healthy skepticism regarding their basic data. For example, Graunt noted that numbers for “French smallpox” (syphilis) were always very low. This is because families wished to avoid shame, so “only the hated ones, those who had their noses eaten, were reported.” On the other hand, those recorded as dying of more respectable “old age” were inevitably exaggerated.
Upon publication, graunt Notes It attracted the attention it deserved. Within a month, Charles II had read it himself, and recommended that Graunt be made a Fellow of the Royal Society. There was some quibbling about allowing a mere shopkeeper to enter such high ranks, but the king heard nothing of such objections: “If they find any more of these merchants, they must be sure to let them all in, without any further ado.”
Sadly, Graunt’s fall from grace was equally rapid. When the Great Fire of London broke out in 1666, he was accused of having “some hand” in it. He was an officer in a water company at the time, but there is no certain evidence of his negligence, nor of his encouragement to start the fire, despite the widespread incompetence of the firefighters.
The fact is that Graunt had converted to Catholicism – at the very moment when public opinion was turning against the “papists.” Furthermore, Grunt’s haberdashery buildings burned to the ground in the fire, leaving him facing bankruptcy. He died in 1674, at the age of fifty-three, “falling into poverty.” Not even his own works were saved – his unscrupulous “friend” William Petty said he sponsored Graunt’s work, introducing original ideas that elevated his activities from mere fact-gathering to original statistical analysis.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week for free.
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
