Panel discussion on "The regulation of public numbers"

June 23, 6 to 8 pm, Main Quad Pavilion.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/main-quad-pavilion

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 will discuss 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.

Our panelists – drawn from government, advocacy groups, and academia –
will approach these concerns by examining the political, conceptual,
legal and administrative challenges facing official statistics today.
They are:

- Ed Humpherson (Director General for Regulation, UK Statistics Authority)

- Mike Hughes (Consultant on Official Statistics)

- Diane Coyle (University of Manchester, author of GDP: A brief but
affectionate history)

- Saamah Abdallah (New Economics Foundation, Programme manager on Wellbeing)

- Mary Morgan (London School of Economics, author of The World in the Model)

- Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard Kennedy School of Government, author (with
Sang-Hyun Kim) of Dreamscapes of Modernity)


The event is organized by the project “Economics in the Public
Sphere”, funded by the European Research Council:
www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/econpublic

The event is free but ticketed through Eventbrite at
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/panel-the-regulation-of-public-numbers-tickets-25792383714