This collection contains four quantitative and ten miscellaneous pieces—four reports on research in progress, three historiographical essays, two articles on contemporary politics and political economy, and one jeremiad—plus a joke! The best pieces are truly quantitative and historical. Marta Mier y Terán condenses to ten pages a two-volume dissertation, now the standard demographic study on Mexico in the twentieth century. She argues that, although roughly 70 percent of Mexico’s population growth from 1895 to 1970 was due to the mortality transition, fertility decline before 1970 reduced growth by about one-fourth (p. 101). Also among the revisionists, Stephen Haber meticulously tallies the balance sheets of a dozen large industrial concerns during the last years of the Porfiriato to find that “investing in manufacturing was as good a way to lose money as it was to make it” (p. 174). For these firms profits were low or, as in the case of the famous Fundidora Monterrey, almost nonexistent year after year. Stephanie Granato and Aida Mostkoff defend the Statistical Abstract of Latin America’s class structure series, updating it to 1980. They demolish the “30 percent myth” (which is, in fact, the percentage of omissions regarding branch of economic activity in the 1980 census), to construct an index from principal occupation data which are only 84 percent complete. James Wilkie’s statement in the prologue that the data are “100 percent complete” (p. 18) is a genuine myth in the making, as Granato and Mostkoff unequivocally explain that omissions amount to 16 percent (pp. 119-120, 128). Moreover, widening disparities between the SALA income and occupation series hint that it may be time to move beyond published data to compute tables directly from the Dirección General de Estadística’s national sample. Finally, in 14 full-page charts, David Lorey depicts the emergence of business degrees as the dominant academic route for professionals, with the shares for law and health narrowing steadily throughout the twentieth century.
The remaining medley is less satisfying. Moreover, though all the pieces were presented at a single colloquium in Mexico City, it was not organized to survey the field of quantitative studies nor to sample methods, subjects, or even periods. Amid this miscellany, nevertheless, the reader will find, in the papers noted, several important quantitative studies.
