Georgina Sturge is a Statistician at the House of Commons Library. She is one of a team of senior statisticians who advise the 650 Members of Parliament - from all parties - on the use of statistics and who carry out impartial research for them. Whenever there is a debate in Parliament, they compile general background information for Members and answer their direct questions. Georgina sees first-hand how data is used in the policy process. She sees the constant demand for it, how politicians are not able to take 'no data' for an answer, how statistics get warped and how nuance and uncertainty are overlooked. She sees how important decisions being made based on data that is really not robust enough for that purpose.Her background is in quantitative public policy analysis. She trained in this at the United Nations University and Maastricht University Graduate School of Governance. Prior to working at Parliament, she worked as a primary researcher in the fields of global development, international migration, social security, poverty and inequality. She has helped design and carry out primary data collection through large-scale population surveys in several countries.She is a member of the Office for National Statistics' expert advisory group on population and migration statistics and an advisor to the University of Oxford's Migration Observatory.
Essential reading for anyone who's ever wondered where all those
numbers come from. Even more essential reading for anyone who
hasn't. An incisive and urgently needed book
*Tim Harford, bestselling author of HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD ADD UP
and presenter of BBC Radio 4's More or Less*
A tour de force ... To study BAD DATA is to discover the extreme
limits to official knowledge
*TLS*
Sturge is very effective at explaining, with human examples, how
bad data affects lives. Readers of Hannah Fry's HELLO WORLD or
Caroline Criado Perez's INVISIBLE WOMEN will be familiar with the
notion that biased humans create biased artificial intelligence
programmes. Here, we see their direct effects. ... [BAD DATA] is so
good at inspiring curiosity and the inclination to challenge
*Guardian*
A whistle-stop tour of all the ways the data that forms the basis
of policymaking can fall short
*New Statesman*
[An] excellent book ... there's something here for everyone who
wants to better understand the limits of our knowledge about the
country ... informative and at times amusing
*TLS*
Bracing ... the story of how often things go wrong in the political
use of statistics
*London Review of Books*
This informative, reasoned, and apolitical book offers a string of
examples to show that statistics are not always what they seem
*Quillette*
The plural of anecdote is not data. But Georgina Sturge's
entertaining introduction to the uses (and misuses) of data in
public policy and debate combines numerous stories, some amusing,
some disturbing, with a penetrating analysis of why statistical
literacy matters to our politics and our daily lives
*Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy*
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