Of Tragedies and Statistics

A great many documentary films have used the generalized method, that is, the showing of a condition or an event as it affects a group of people. The audience can then have a personalized reaction from imagining one member of that group. I have felt that this is the more difficult observation from the audience's viewpoint. It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving. In The Forgotten Village we reversed the usual process. Our story centered on one family in one small village[.]

- John Steinbeck, from the preface to the book version of the 1941 documentary film, The Forgotten Village. 

The title of this post, of course, recalls the quote often attributed to Stalin, which is an attribution of questionable authenticity (the source first making this attribution may actually have been paraphrasing Steinbeck and inaccurately attributing it to Stalin). This famous quote says:

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.

Steinbeck, in turn may have been referencing an earlier statement in 1916 from a California anarchist publication called The Blast, which stated:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China.