On the night of the Brexit referendum the “Economics in the Public Sphere” project at University College London hosted a panel discussion on the regulation of public numbers. We heard about lying with numbers, and how to choose numbers that move people. We heard about independent statisticians and shy regulators. We heard about the politics of numbers and measurement.
The speakers came from government, advocacy groups, and academia and were Mike Hughes (Royal Statistical Society); Ed Humpherson (Director General for Regulation, UK Statistics Authority); 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).
You can watch the whole event on youtube, here. But as a teaser I post Mary’s terrific contribution.
History of Economics Playground Redux 