UCL STS Seminar series: Public numbers: the politics of quantification and relational expectations

Public numbers: the politics of quantification and relational expectations.  

Abstract

Numbers are everywhere. Statistics, indicators, indexes and scores that govern public and private bureaucracies. In this talk and accompanying essay I ask what is the relationship between public numbers and economic expectations? My answer is that public numbers relate to expectations in three ways. Numbers can be data, and inform our expectations about economic futures. In a reversal of the causal chain, expectations may condition the credibility of numbers as representations of economic reality. Finally, I argue that numbers play a coordinating role, helping to hold together social relations in a competitive and antagonistic political economy and they are able to do this because they make those relations predictable.