IMPROVING LIVES THROUGH DATA ECOSYSTEMS

Challenges and opportunities in advancing human endeavor through SDGs: Guarding against the tyranny of technology and numerology

Pali Lehohla

Statistician-General South Africa

5^th OECD World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy

Guadalajara Mexico 13-15 October 2015

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present the last opportunity for the universe to mend its ways and advance human endeavor towards people, planet, prosperity and peace.  In September at the United Nations Assembly, heads of states and government signed on the SDGs and by so doing committed to this mammoth task.

I was asked to identify the one single most difficult challenge of the SDG agenda and how it can be addressed?

In discussing this matter I thought I should be provocative in order to bring home the gravity of the message. I found the most difficult challenge for the SDGs agenda as the emerging internecine struggle between its crucial allies, technology and statistics.  This I term the tyranny of technology and numerology. It is an emergent interest that is poised to undermine the global freedoms project of the SDGs.

How will it come about: It comes about as a consequence of the un-negotiated forced marriage of convenience between official statistics, data and technology. This is a phenomena of the 21^st century where statistics has increasingly lagged technology in ways unprecedented and the gap is growing by leaps and bounds.

Prior to the technology explosion, statistics have always been produced in a technological environment with statistical needs generally being the prime driver of the technology.  For instance the need for processing large scale datasets in censuses was driven by statistics offices.  Kodak pioneered the manufacturing of earlier albeit less successful census data scanners.  The spatial files of the US Bureau of the Census called Tiger files created a major boost and opened new frontiers for the GIS market.  Dr Goodnight and his Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) at the SAS Institute dominated the statistics fraternity for at least four decades before Microsoft Excel came to the scene.  The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) by IBM was premiere technological innovations that opened the logic of human endeavor to society and policy, and this was driven by statistical analysis needs.

What creates the environment for this tyranny: 

First the disruptive technology of data revolution, a phenomena of the 21^st century, with a very strong heuristic epistemology has upset the apple cut and has brought about a new forceful polity for a forced marriage between technology and statistics. Unmanaged this potentially will cost us the freedoms and wellbeing project that is envisaged in the SDGs.

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