Nearly two thousand years have passed since a census decreed by Caesar Augustus became part of the greatest story ever told. Many things have changed in the intervening years. The hotel industry worries more about overbuilding than overcrowding, and if they had to meet an unexpected influx, few inns would have a manager to accommodate the weary guests. Now it is the census taker that does the traveling in the fond hope that a highly mobile population will stay put long enough to get a good sampling.
Methods of gathering, recording, and evaluating information have probably been improved a great deal. ①And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to obtain a head count as an adequate basis for levying taxes, now batteries of complicated statistical series furnished by governmental agencies and private organizations are eagerly scanned and interpreted by sages and prophets to get a clue to future s.
The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They were aired at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. ②There was the thought that business forecasting might well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about newfangled(新花样的)computers and complicated mathematical systems in terms of excitement and endearment which we, at least in our younger years when these things mattered, would have associate more readily with the description of a fair maiden. ③But others pointed to the deplorable(可叹的) very bad record of highly esteemed forecasts and forecaster with a batting average below that of the Nets, and the President elect of the Association cautioned that "high powered statistical methods are usually in order where the facts are crude and inadequate, the exact contrary of that crude and inadequate statisticians assume."
④We left somewhere between hope and despair and with the conviction, not really newly acquired that proper statistical methods applied to ascertainable facts have their merits in economic forecasting as long as neither forecaster nor public is induced into mistaking the description of probabilities and trends for a prediction of certainties of mathematical attitude.
The author refers to the Romans primarily in order to ______.