Robert Meyer · 1914
Robert Meyer’s text is a printed lecture report: it offers a selective account of the economic-statistical work discussed at the 1913 Vienna session of the International Statistical Institute. Its central thesis is that the Institute’s seemingly technical labor—definitions, comparable data, index numbers, fiscal categories, labor statistics—belongs at the center of modern economic administration. Meyer frames statistics as a practical science of comparability, not as public spectacle.
Gemeinverständliche populäre Erfolge können daher dem Wirken des Institutes überhaupt nicht beschieden sein.
English translation: Popularly intelligible, general successes can therefore not be the lot of the Institute's work at all.
The lecture first explains the Institute’s institutional character: unlike an open congress, it is a closed, co-opted scholarly body devoted to advancing administrative and scientific statistics. Meyer praises the planned permanent office and Annuaire, while also noting that the Vienna agenda was overloaded. Still, the printed reports give the session its real substance.
Die Berichte sind aber zum Teile von ganz hervorragendem Werte, ich werde auf einige derselben näher einzugehen Gelegenheit haben: in ihrer Gesamtheit stellen sie ein höchst beachtenswertes Resultat wissenschaftlicher Arbeit dar.
English translation: The reports, however, are in part of quite outstanding value—I shall have occasion to discuss some of them more closely—and taken as a whole they represent a most noteworthy result of scientific work.
Meyer then narrows the field to “Wirtschaftsstatistik,” while showing how porous that field is: population movement, insurance, housing, women’s work, public finance, agriculture, securities, unemployment, and social insurance all enter economic interpretation. The main analytical section concerns national income and wealth. Meyer contrasts tax-based income estimates with “objective” inventory methods that value land, buildings, mines, livestock, capital, and foreign claims. His conceptual move is methodological pluralism rather than statistical dogmatism.
Die Debatte in der Sektion hat mit dem ziemlich selbstverständlichen Resultate geschlossen, daß keine der Methoden für sich allein befriedigende Resultate liefere und die Statistik fortfahren müsse, die eine durch die andere zu kontrollieren und zu ergänzen.
English translation: The debate in the section closed with the rather self-evident result that none of the methods on its own yields satisfactory results, and that statistics must continue to check and complement the one by the other.
Fellner’s estimates of Austrian and Hungarian national wealth receive respectful but critical attention. Meyer recognizes why such numbers matter: they could influence the imperial quota for common expenses. But he also stresses that valuation assumptions, especially for land, may make Austrian and Hungarian figures less comparable than they appear.
In dem Volksvermögen Österreichs und Ungarns kommt die wirtschaftliche Kraft der beiden Staaten in hervorragend plastischer Weise zum Ausdrucke.
English translation: In the national wealth of Austria and Hungary, the economic power of the two states finds an eminently vivid expression.
A second major topic is Alfred Neymarck’s international statistics of negotiable securities. Meyer presents this as both a triumph of financial enumeration and a warning about the fragility of a paper-credit world. Neymarck’s closing appeal for peace gives the lecture, published in 1914, a sharply prewar resonance.
La paix du monde, paix internationale entre les peuples et les gouvernements, la paix intérieure entre les hommes s'imposent pour maintenir l'échafaudage actuel de papiers de crédit et d'affaires qui existe.
English translation: World peace—international peace between peoples and governments, and internal peace among men—is indispensable to maintain the existing scaffolding of credit paper and business affairs.
The most methodological part treats “Sémiologie,” the search for measurable symptoms of national welfare: production, trade, transport, credit, public finance, consumption, savings, and sometimes moral statistics. Meyer explains the appeal of long-run index series but emphasizes the unresolved difficulty of constructing a general index from heterogeneous social facts. Through Yves Guyot, he moves from symptoms to causes: harvests, capital formation, capital use, war, legislation, and strikes.
Les prix peuvent devenir des causes, mais ils sont d'abord des résultats.
English translation: Prices can become causes, but they are first of all results.
The final movement turns from wealth to social risk. Meyer highlights the Mayr-Varlez report on unemployment as an example of fruitful cooperation among international bodies, and he stresses the conceptual difficulty of distinguishing cyclical unemployment from sickness, seasonal work, strikes, lockouts, underemployment, and ordinary job changes.
Daß das Thema mit dem Rückgange der Konjunktur von Tag zu Tag an praktischer Bedeutung zunimmt, brauche ich Ihnen nicht erst zu sagen.
English translation: That the subject is gaining in practical importance from day to day as the business cycle declines, I need hardly tell you.
The work’s relevance lies in its view of statistics as an exacting but worldly discipline. Meyer’s Institute is not detached from politics or administration; it mediates between technical form and economic life. His closing judgment states the lecture’s governing idea:
Das Institut steht in engster Fühlung mit den großen wirtschaftlichen Fragen, die unsere Zeit bewegen.
English translation: The Institute is in the closest contact with the great economic questions that move our time.
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