What-o-philia??

Blame the late Angus Maddison who coined the term to denote his own fondness for historical number-crunching. Strictly it's "love of figures", though in reality it's curiosity about the dimensions of the past and present: How big? How many? How much bigger is it now than it was then? How quickly did it get there?

So what does a chiffrephile do? Well, they count and estimate, calculate and occasionally guess where there's nothing else to go on. They spend a lot of their time picking apart other people's numbers while hoping nobody notices the glaring holes in their own alternative method and results. And sometimes they'll try to make sense of what they've come up with, occasionally successfully.

This blog is in part a memorial to Maddison's own part in fuelling my own nascent chiffrephilia. It's also going to be a place for trying to come up with better data, as was Maddison's declared intention in publishing his own aggregates.

This then is a blog about quantity in history, from our earliest guesstimates up to the present. There'll be lot of picking apart others' findings, and hopefully I'll be able to offer better ones. And perhaps people with better numbers will come along and demolish mine. That's how we learn more.