CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The paper explore the transformations of public statistics in Argentina in a period when the State was consolidated as an agent responsible for promoting and planning development, during the 1960s. In a time of high valuation of technical knowledge, when economic planning and directed social change were discussed, the sudden passage from the Department of statistics to the Institute of national statistics (a name more associated with the practice of scientific research than the traditional administrative forms linked with the national statistical office since the late nineteenth century) actually accompanied the emergence of a new set of characteristics of the statistical regime: the organization of the statistical agencies under the model of a system with a central orientation, the application of sampling methods in the generation of information and the incorporation to a transnational circuit of ideas and statistical models, linked to discussions on the development of a device to measure "social welfare", in terms similar to those of the national accounts. These changes in public statistics are related to other processes that were taking place in the country: the consolidation of specific agencies to supply technical advice to the political leadership of the state, the creation of careers in social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires to provide young professionals (economists and sociologists, among others) that feed the specialized technical bureaucracies required by the planner state, and the formation of economic and sociological research institutes. All these processes will be involved in our analysis from the perspective of the political and social history of statistics.