“Statistical methods had taken fire in America around 1942, following a series of ten-day intensive courses for engineers, initiated by Stanford University on a suggestion from this author. The war department also gave courses at factories of suppliers. Brilliant applications attracted much attention, but the flare of statistical methods by themselves, in an atmosphere in which management did not know their responsibilities, burned, sputtered, fizzled and died out.”

Source: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, (1982), p. 101

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Statistical methods had taken fire in America around 1942, following a series of ten-day intensive courses for engineer…" by W. Edwards Deming?
W. Edwards Deming photo
W. Edwards Deming 33
American professor, author, and consultant 1900–1993

Related quotes

George E. P. Box photo

“We have a large reservoir of engineers (and scientists) with a vast background of engineering know how. They need to learn statistical methods that can tap into the knowledge. Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress…”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Statement of 1992, quoted in Introduction to Statistical Experimental Design — What is it? Why and Where is it Useful? (2002) Johan Trygg & Svante Wold

W. Edwards Deming photo
George Klir photo
Hilaire Belloc photo

“Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"On Statistics"
The Silence of the Sea (1940)

Ragnar Frisch photo

“I approached the problem of utility measurement in 1923 during a stay in Paris. There were three objects I had in view :
:(I) To point out the choice axioms that are implied when we think of utility as a quantity, and to define utility in a rigorous way by starting from a set of such axioms;
:(II) To develop a method of measuring utility statistically;
:(III) To apply the method to actual data.
The results of my study along these lines are contained in a paper “Sur un Problème d’Économic Pure”, published in the Series Norsk Matematisk Forenings Skrifter, Serie I, Nr 16, 1926. In this paper, the axiomatics are worked out so far as the static utility concept is concerned. The method of measurement developed is the method of isoquants, which is also outlined in Section 4 below. The statistical data to which the method was applied were sales and price statistics collected by the “Union des Coopérateurs Parisien”. From these data I constructed what I believe can be considered the marginal utility curve of money for the “average” member of the group of people forming the customers of the union. To my knowledge, this is the first marginal utility curve of money ever published.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1932) New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility. Mohr, Tübingen. p. 2-3: Quoted in: Dagsvik, John K., Steinar Strøm, and Zhiyang Jia. " A stochastic model for the utility of income http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp358.pdf." (2003).
1930s

“Every course would be a course in methods of learning and, therefore, in methods of teaching.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: If every college teacher taught his courses in the manner we have suggested, there would be no needs for a methods course. Every course would be a course in methods of learning and, therefore, in methods of teaching. For example, a "literature" course would be a course in the process of learning how to read. A history course would be a course in the process of learning how to do history. And so on. But this is the most farfetched possibility of all since college teachers, generally speaking, are more fixated on the Trivia game, than any group of teachers in the educational hierarchy. Thus we are left with the hope that, if methods courses could be redesigned to be model learning environments, the educational revolution might begin. In other words, it will begin as soon as there are enough young teachers who sufficiently despise the crippling environments they are employed to supervise to want to subvert them. The revolution will begin to be visible when such teachers take the following steps (many students who have been through the course we have described do not regard these as "impractical"): 1. Eliminate all conventional "tests" and "testing." 2. Eliminate all "courses." 3. Eliminate all "requirements." 4. Eliminate all full time administrators and administrations. 5. Eliminate all restrictions that confine learners to sitting still in boxes inside of boxes.... the conditions we want to eliminate... happen to be the sources of the most common obstacles to learning. We have largely trapped ourselves in our schools into expending almost all of our energies and resources in the direction of preserving patterns and procedures that make no sense even in their own terms. They simply do not produce the results that are claimed as their justification in the first place — quite the contrary. If it is practical to persist in subsidizing at an ever-increasing social cost a system which condemns our youth to ten or 12 or 16 years of servitude in a totalitarian environment ostensibly for the purpose of training them to be fully functioning, self-renewing citizens of democracy, then we are vulnerable to whatever criticisms that can be leveled.

“For a person who wants to do original, realistic, and critical work in statistics there is no atmosphere anywhere in the world today to compare with this Department.”

Leonard Jimmie Savage (1917–1971) American mathematician

Leonard Jimmie Savage, (1960) cited in: W.A. Wallis, "Leonard Jimmie Savage 1917-1971," in E Shils (ed.), Remembering the University of Chicago: teachers, scientists, and scholars. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991), 436-451; Quoted in: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson (2010).
Letter to Chicago Department before taking up a professorship at the University of Michigan.

“Methods by which engineers stabilise their mechanisms suggest analogous possibilities for stabilising economic systems.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Arnold Tustin (1957) " The mechanism of economic instability http://books.google.com/books?id=Nou8mkjPMPUC&pg=PA8" in: New Scientist, Oct. 27, 1957. p. 8

Walter A. Shewhart photo

Related topics