The twentieth century was truly the first measured century, the first era when the disparate activity of human life came to be seen as quantifiable and people set out to change the world using data. That is the provocative thesis behind a new reference book from the AEI Press and a related three-hour prime time television special airing this month on PBS.

Following the rise of social science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans became the most energetic measurers of social life who ever lived. In addition to more elaborately measuring everything that had been counted in other countries before, such as population and the size of the government’s territory and army, Americans pioneered the measurement of facets of life that had never been systematically quantified, such as crime, love, food, entertainment, religion, and work.

That tradition of counting and measuring social conditions gradually spread to virtually every area of American life, and numerical thinking became commonplace in our public discourse. Key statistics that we take for granted and that now fill the news--the gross national product, the consumer price index, the unemployment rate, the teenage pregnancy rate, the poverty rate, and so forth--were inventions of the American twentieth century.

The new book that explores these insights is The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000, a comprehensive reference work written by Theodore Caplow of the University of Virginia, AEI research fellow Louis Hicks, and AEI senior fellow Ben J. Wattenberg. The authors draw out the most significant and interesting trends underlying the mass of available data. The book’s chapters cover numerous aspects of population, work, education, family life, religion, leisure, health, politics, crime, transportation, communications, and the economy. Each subtopic is addressed in a one-page essay written for the general reader and illustrated by one or more colored charts on the facing page.

A specially commissioned feature of The First Measured Century is original 1999 research that builds on Robert and Helen Lynd’s landmark sociological study of Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s called Middletown: A Study in Cultural Change. In 1978 and again in 1999, Caplow lead a team of social scientists that replicated and extended the Lynds’ original work, using the same survey instruments in the same place with the same wording that the Lynds had used twenty-five years earlier. The First Measured Century, therefore, offers the longest time line of consistent attitudinal data in existence.

The book also serves as a companion volume to the three-hour PBS television special "The First Measured Century," created by the producers of Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. Wattenberg serves as the host-essayist for the documentary, which premieres on December 20 at 8:30 p.m. eastern time (check local listings for air time in your area).

The show focuses on the history of the twentieth century through the stories of those who did the measuring, from Julia Lathrop’s data-driven crusade to reduce infant mortality to George Gallup’s bold placement of public opinion polls on the front page, to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial analysis of the breakdown of the black family.

Interviewees appearing on "The First Measured Century" include Sen. Moynihan, Betty Friedan, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, Francis Fukuyama, George Gallup Jr., Seymour Martin Lipset, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, James Q. Wilson, and William Julius Wilson.