The plural of anecdote is (not?) data

--- Raymond Wolfinger, per email to Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, cited in David Smith, "The plural of anecdote is data, after all" (2011)

I [Shapiro] e-mailed Wolfinger last year and got the following response from him:

"I said 'The plural of anecdote is data' some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student's dismissal of a simple factual statement -- by another student or me -- as a mere anecdote. The quotation was my rejoinder. Since then I have missed few opportunities to quote myself. The only appearance in print that I can remember is Nelson Polsby's accurate quotation and attribution in an article in PS: Political Science and Politics in 1993; I believe it was in the first issue of the year."

I was led to this quote by a remark of Martin Weiss during his paper presentation at TPRC 2013 on Saturday. It led me to riff during my paper presentation that inside the Beltway, the plural of anecdotes is truth.

Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty

--- Oxfam America, Introduction to the report, The politics of partnership: How donors manage risk while letting recipients lead their own development, December 2011

In context:

No amount of aid will “deliver” development. Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty. Aid is ultimately useful to the extent that recipient citizens and governments can use it effectively. Increased efforts by donors to maintain tight control over aid often end up making aid less useful to recipients, and the converse also is true. Genuine partnerships with people and their governments makes aid more effective over the long term. This reality is well known to donors and recipients alike, yet donors consistently find it politically difficult to trust recipients to share in the design and allocation of aid.