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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970

This is a response to the recent critique of my book The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1970) by Felix G. Boni and Mitchell A. Seligson. Their factor analysis of my data on poverty suggests, first, that their methodology is more "sensitive" than mine; second, that they have confirmed the thrust of an earlier analysis by Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith; and third, that the task of quantitative history is to reduce data of "unwieldy proportions" so that it is subject to greater understanding.

Although at one time some Latin Americanists may have supposed that "(a) useful historical material from Latin America does not exist in statistical form, and (b) even if it did exist, the mystical qualities of Latin culture defy all efforts at measurement," today we are aware of such fallacies. Leaving aside useful, relatively reliable data, however, we still face the question of how to handle figures which apparently are unreliable and unusable. This article approaches the latter problem by presenting some debatable hypotheses in order to suggest examples of little-examined descriptive statistics which might be investigated fruitfully to reveal new political, economic, and social aspects of Mexican life.

In Raising Questions Concerning Methodology in My Book, The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910, Professors Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith have offered a reminder that statistics "do not speak for themselves." The authors of "Notes on Quantitative History" are to be commended for undertaking a lengthy article examining some long-standing problems which historians face in attempting to understand the Latin American past.