Life, 1915-10-28 · page 33 of 52
Life — October 28, 1915 — page 33: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page satirizes professional statistician Roger Babson's claim that increasing numbers of well-dressed men on streets signal economic recovery. Life magazine ridicules the absurdity of this metric by suggesting it requires obsessive, impractical counting and categorization—a statistician standing on corners obsessively judging whether each passerby qualifies as "well-dressed" enough. The top cartoon shows a ship's captain pointing dramatically (caption: "How he would have enjoyed this way of being frightful!"), likely referencing a historical figure or contemporary news story, though the specific reference is unclear. The bottom cartoon depicts working-class men discussing becoming "sandwich-men"—people who wore advertising boards front and back. The satire suggests that if economic prosperity merely meant seeing more well-dressed people on streets, perhaps they were simply unemployed men hired to wear suits while advertising products—a superficial and hollow measure of genuine economic improvement.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
HOW HE WOULD HAVE ENJOYED THIS WAY OF BEING FRIGHTFUL! Statistics tory average and reduce the probability of error to the . es utmost minimum. Statisticians must not be casual in the R. ROGER BABSON, professional statistician, and jeasy degree. They must always be formal and complete. often spoken of as “ the well-known statistician,” tells E.0.. us that “one of the hopeful signs of our returning pros- perity is the increasing number of well-dressed men one meets on the street.” Which only goes to prove that there is no degree of thor- oughness too ultra for a statistician when his momentum is in good working order. Who but a statistician would patiently stand on the corner and count the well-dressed men as they came along, ever and anon plaguing his dis- criminative faculties to decide whether a certain individual should be classed as well-dressed or poorly-dressed? Mr. Babson must have done it in that meticulous way or else he is not a true statistician, which is not to be considered. He must indeed have statistized on several different streets, knowing from previous figures just how many well-dressed people were indigenous to each locality, and making the “SAY, DO YOU FELLOWS WANT TO MAKE A LITTLE MONEY AS proper comparisons. Only thus could he strike a satisfac- SANDWICH-MEN ?” comicbooks.com