One of the features of the fake news era is the use and abuse of statistics. Although political campaigns have always presented statistics in the most favourable light, more recently we’ve seen partisan campaigns losing their inhibitions about making up numbers. At the same time, there are new fact-checking organisations. Is this inevitably now a post-fact world, or could there be a way of ensuring the integrity of statistics is respected in public debate? Our panel, chaired by Alvin Birdi (University of Bristol), includes Matt Dickson (University of Bath), Gloria Origgi (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), Felix Ritchie (UWE) and Hetan Shah (Royal Statistical Society).
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Panel
Alvin Birdi (chair) is professor of Economics Education in the Economics Department of the School of Economics, Finance and Management at the University of Bristol. He is also the University of Bristol’s academic director of Undergraduate Studies and the director of The Economics Network, a national body that trains lecturers and promotes high quality and innovative teaching practice in Economics within the Higher Education sector.
Matt Dickson is a reader in public policy at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, having joined the University in 2012 as a Prize (Research) Fellow. He previously held a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship at the UCD Geary Institute, University College Dublin, and prior to that an ESRC Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship in Economics at the University of Bristol. His research interests include intergenerational social mobility, wage inequality, poverty dynamics, public pay premia and a number of topics related to education, particularly the returns to education and the impact of selective schooling on later inequality. He has published in international journals including the Economic Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Association (Series A), Labour Economics, the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Economics of Education Review and Economics Letters, along with a number of reports for Government departments.
Gloria Origgi, a Paris-based philosopher, is a senior researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod at the National Center for Scientific Research. She is the author of Reputation: What It Is and Why It Matters and editor of Text-E: Text in the Age of the Internet. She writes a blog in English, French and Italian at gloriaoriggi.blogspot.com.
Felix Ritchie is professor of Applied Economics and director of the Bristol Centre for Economics and Finance at the University of the West of England (UWE). His research interests include the use, quality and accessibility of government data, and its policy application; labour economics, particularly low pay; data confidentiality, security and access; and decision-making in the public sector.
Hetan Shah is executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, a body with over 8,000 members with a vision to put data at the heart of understanding and decision-making. He is chair of the Friends Provident Foundation, a grant making trust seeking to create a fairer economy. He is a visiting senior research fellow at the Policy Institute, Kings College London and is Honorary Vice President of the Geographical Association. He is a member of the Social Metrics Commission. which is designing new poverty indicators for the UK, and is a member of the Big Lottery’s Impact committee.
