 Hume appealed explicitly to the law of large numbers and invoked a number of mean-reverting tendencies, as in his commitment to uniform wages, prices and interest rates. Quantitative efforts to measure population or the money supply were undertaken with much regularity starting in the 1660s, despite a paucity of data (Endres 1985; Derringer 2018). Many, such as Graunt, understood the value of trimming outliers and seeking what Thomas Simpson (1755) coined as the arithmetic mean (see Stigler 1986; Klein 1997). Smith’s analysis of the wage spectrum was grounded in the belief that market forces had established stable and salient wages for each type of trade, and that deviations could be reduced down to his list of six key factors (Smith 1776 [1976: 82–104]).