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Any scholar who has followed the ongoing debates in the profession over the use and misuse of quantitative data for the study of historical phenomena is well aware of the perils inherent in any attempt to use numbers to help explain the past. The controversy surrounding Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross is only the most visible manifestation of the continuing battle over the limits, usefulness, and standards of quantitative history. Closer to home, in the pages of this journal, we have witnessed the exchange between Wilkie, Smith, and Skidmore over the proper way to analyze and interpret Mexican budgetary accounts.

After more than a decade of experience, Venezuela's policy planning establishment has come to demand increasingly high levels of performance from its staffs in response to the increasing complexity of the planning tasks proposed. The need to plan for the effects of changing demographic characteristics and to cope with the widespread consequences for the dynamics of family patterns and social interaction that these changes imply, for example, has forced the development planner to search for new tools of analysis which will allow him to gauge accurately the impact of various policy alternatives.

In this work, Carrera Damas captures a significant transition for the nation that began in the 1940s when Rómulo Betancourt and his colleagues overthrew the ruling military dictatorship and established a modern democratic regime. However, the system Betancourt created eventually deteriorated after his presidency. Carrera Damas not only delves into the evolving political thought of a leader who remained dedicated to his cause throughout a varied career, but also offers insights on what it takes to create and sustain a democratic republic under difficult circumstances.