Statisticians figure it all out in Dublin

THE STATISTICIANS of the world gather in Dublin this week, generating a few impressive statistics of their own as they do so.

A total of 2,300 delegates from 120 countries will deliver 1,300 papers over the coming days at the Conference Centre, Dublin.

The hosting in Dublin of the biennial World Statistics Congress is something of a coup for the Central Statistics Office (CSO), which is helping to organise it.

Far from being the preserve of number-crunchers and policy wonks, delegates will be discussing issues critical to ordinary people.

The sovereign debt crisis, for instance, was created by bogus statistics which underestimated Greece’s budget deficit by almost half and shattered investors’ confidence in the country.

Several papers at the conference will be devoted to such aspects of the financial crisis, dealing with issues of how to properly measure economic indicators and ethical matters around the political pressure on statisticians to produce misleading figures.

One paper will be devoted to the issue of how Ireland’s bank debt was added to the national debt.

At the event inauguration last night, Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton said the poor quality of statistics held by Irish banks meant they did not understand the risks they were taking.

All of Wednesday will be devoted to measuring water demand and quality – an issue of key importance, especially in the developing world. There will be papers on measuring quality of life, the efficacy of the smoking ban, and house price trends.

Seminars will feature on how to communicate statistics to the public and how to make a career in statistics attractive for the young in an age where many of them find mathematics a boring subject.

CSO director general Gerard O’Hanlon, chairman of the national organising committee, said making sense of the proliferation of statistical information now available would be one of the most sought-after jobs in the future.

“Hal Varian, the chief economist of Google, has said statistics is the sexy job of the next 10 years,” Mr O’Hanlon said. The biggest challenge facing statisticians was objectivity, he added. “We say figures don’t lie, liars figure.”