The regulation of public numbers - Q&A
Channel: ECONPUBLIC
Date: 2016-07-25

Panel on "The regulation of public numbers"

The event ran in association with the annual meeting of the Science and Democracy Network, June 23 pm, Main Quad Pavilion, UCL.

Official statistics and indicators are indispensable to present day governance. These public numbers serve as aids to representation of society, government, economy and knowledge. Unions and employers’ associations bargain over price indexes; aid agencies and developing nations argue over rule-of-law indicators; and the United Nations pore over the intricacies of novel statistics and indicators of sustainable development. Along with this proliferation of public numbers comes a deluge of raw digital data within near-universal reach, from which advances in IT promise to deliver untold insights.

Our panel discussed these developments and aspirations by reflecting on the public numbers most neglected in the contemporary imagination: official state-sanctioned statistics, such as the Gross National Product and the general household survey. Only by looking at the regulation and enactment of official statistics can we hope to understand how numbers have come to play such a crucial role in our polities.