assessing vintage card scarcity

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Posted By: barrysloate 

I just finished reading Tim Newcomb's exhaustive study of T207 in VCBC and I had a thought about evaluating the scarcity of many of the vintage card sets. I have pondered this many times before, and posed the question to Tim.
Imagine hypothetically that a set was issued in 1910 that consisted of 100 different subjects, and that exactly 1000 of each card was produced, no more or less. It's now nearly a hundred years later, and clearly the vast majority have been lost over time. I think we agree that it would be mathematically impossible for the exact number of each of the 100 cards to have survived. In some cases, less than 5 would still exist. In others, perhaps 10-15 survived. Maybe with some 20-30 are still around. It is even theoretically possible that in one or more cases none survived. We could study this set today an analyze it thoroughly to determine which are the rare cards and which are the commons, and try to determine the mysteries of its production. But the fact is, all were issued equally, therefore there is no great secret as to how the set was really produced.
Has anyone else thought of this? And are there any statisticians out there who could estimate the extremes of what could or couldn't survive over the years. Is it possible we are coming up with postulations about scarcity that are therefore incorrect? Opinions are welcome.