“Statisticians are the dentists of mathematics” like, they do a very specialised job that a generalist would struggle to perform correctly without their level of specialised training, where performing their duties inadequately or forgoiing their services can completely disrupt the function of various area of life/business?

Why would cities care about national or international companies? I’m confused.

[This is OP on a different account + device] Good question, I didn’t make it clear. So what I was thinking is, where I live,

1. The city council has large control over the economy, choosing where businesses can put up their store and monitoring which businesses take up office space in the city.

2. There’s definitely some MLM presence (my local subreddit provided examples and often has people saying “don’t work for this scam!”)

3. So… Does the city council just not care? Or are they perhaps less interventionist than I thought?

4. Lastly, with just how many there are, from the vibe I’m getting from people online complaining about them, surely some of them end up doing business for the city council. So the council ends up getting ripped off or having jobs done to a poor standard.

Thanks for your comment!

Maybe “Marshalls” working for courts would set out on horses to round up runaways and bring them before the court.

I reckon the high prevalance of the Smith surname isn’t really down to a highly smith-based economy, but because it was a quite respectable profession for both social classes - high paid, possibly self employed, talented/educated - but also useful strong and dependable. So if you have to choose between different surnames you might therefore go:

• “ah my parent was a smith so i can be a smith too”
• “my parent chose to use their smith parent’s surname so i will choose it too because it gets respect”

Or, maybe smiths always needed a lot of helpers and instead of taking the surname “Prentice/Prentiss” they would just go with Smith, as it’s neater.

Maybe those with some experience working a forge or shaping metal had more liberty to move to different towns for work; In a new town, locals who’d lived there their whole life wouldn’t need an identifying surname (assuming this is pre-surname consolidation in Britain) but the Smiths would have that as a tradename, thus advertising their services.

Presumably also, every town needed at least one local tinkerer or metalworker - there are/were like 10,000s of distinct villages all over England. So if we presume that tradespeople always have surnames of their trade and non-tradespeople (like farm labourers) don’t usually feel a need to, The Smiths already have a greater share of the surnamed population in the census.

Lastly, I’m guessing the smiths had a somewhat better quality of life in relation to disease and poverty. Possibly the hot forges kill off harmful bacteria and they had “middle class” income and no vulnerability to random agriculture failure, like farmers did.

One reason why I don’t think it’s because “the king ordered loads and loads of people to become smiths during one particular war and we were left with an overabundance of Smiths” is because The high prevelance of the “Smith” surname is also observed in Germany, Spain, Poland and elsewhere. As Schmidt, Herrero and Kowalski, respectively. The more you know!

Sounds like it would be nasty to eat. Is it nice?