Data Poverty in a Thoroughly Planned Economy: Statistics and Data in Socialist Romania
Data Poverty in a Thoroughly Planned Economy: Statistics and Data in Socialist Romania

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the contrasting conceptualization, production, circulation, and use of economic data across the Iron Curtain during the socialist period. With the progressive mathematization of economic science after the Second World War, statistics became of paramount importance ‘East’ and ‘West’ of the Curtain. Data about the economy was not only an object of political intervention and a means to control the economy but became progressively an arena for political competition within and between the two ideological blocs. Presenting a few of the most significant disputes among political authorities and practitioners of disciplines as diverse as economic planning, statistics, cybernetics, and economic informatics, I will illustrate some interweaving trajectories of persons, data-based statistical objects, and forms of knowledge that shaped the socialist and post-socialist infrastructures of economic knowledge production. I claim that, while global disputes over the quality, standardization, and accessibility of data during and after the Cold War stimulated statistical research and occasioned new professional trajectories in both the socialist and capitalist worlds, forms of technical knowledge emerging in micro-communities of quantitative specialists ‘East’ and ‘West’ of the Curtain telescoped into a global competition for knowledge about the economy being magnified by an ideological lens.

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