Governments, for example, have always had a demand for statistics on the wealth of their citizens, as this helped them to collect taxes. In the 17th century, this led Sir William Petty, an Englishman, to count chimneys in order to draw inferences about the wealth of an economy. His works can be seen as the foundation of modern social and economic statistics.
But to find examples of how the supply of statistics has responded to demand one does not have to go back as far as the 17th century. In the 1930s, the Great Depression provided another big push for the development of statistics. At that time, the economic crisis had left its scar on workers, consumers and companies in the United States and Europe.