A few years ago my sister in law came into the study at home while I was doing an undergrad economics assignment, a wall of Excel data in front of me, and came out with the line "'tis far from spreadsheets you were born." And she's right. It is.
That quote was brought back to me last week around the time of the death of former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald. By all accounts he was a man who loved statistics, who reckons that he is the only private citizen of Ireland to have a complete set of CSO figures. Even at his funeral, his son thanked the staff at the CSO for enthralling him with stats during his life. I wonder what my sister in law would have said if she ever met him!
The recent census brought out excitement in Garret FitzGerald, with him writing a column on its importance given Ireland's ever changing demographics. But I also found myself getting a little excited come the 10th of April - indeed I filled out my section a few weeks before, and filled out my parents parts too on the 10th. I even remember saying to my dad "these things are important!" when he gave a "sure it was 1967 or 1968, put either down!" answer to me while I did the census...
So what has all that got to do with anything? This masters has opened my eyes a bit to the importance of data and accurate statistics. For an undergrad assignment data was either considered an irrelevance or a nuisance. But now! As we start our theses a big question has been "what's your data like?" A person could smile with satisfaction if indeed they had a full dataset that they could work with, with all the variables for all the years!
'Tis a long way from spreadsheets we were born. But the importance of them are only becoming apparent now.
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