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 manger 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 presumably been
improved a great deal. And where then it was the modest purpose of Rome to
obtain a simple 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 seers to get a
clue to future events. The Bible does not tell us how the Roman census takers
made out, and as regards our more immediate concern, the reliability of present
day economic forecasting, there are considerable differences of opinion. They
were aired at the celebration of the 125th anniversary of the American
Statistical Association. There was the thought that business forecasting might
well be on its way from an art to a science, and some speakers talked about
newfangled computers and high-falutin mathematical systems in terms of
excitement and endearment which we, at least in our younger years when these
things mattered, would have associated more readily with the description of a
fair maiden. But others pointed to the deplorable record of highly esteemed
forecasts and forecasters with a batting average below that of the Mets, 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 what crude and inadequate statisticians assume". We left his
birthday party 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 deluded into mistaking the delineation of probabilities and trends
for a prediction of certainties of mathematical
exactitude.
单选题
Taxation in Roman days apparently was based on ______.