Policymakers need data about us despite privacy fears

theguardian.com:

Next slide please. We soon caught on to the way it worked. Chris Whitty would give the word and up would pop a chart detailing the progress being made in the fight against Covid-19. There are memes and mugs to commemorate the catchphrase of England’s chief medical officer.

Whitty’s presentations detailed infection rates, hospitalisations and deaths. Within weeks of the pandemic’s arrival in early 2020 the public knew about the R number – a way of assessing how fast the virus was spreading.

Over the months, public concern about Covid-19 has faded and it is now well behind inflation in the list of concerns troubling voters. Rising prices have meant increased scrutiny of the way Britain calculates the cost of living, including from the chef and activist Jack Monroe. The Office for National Statistics calculates the annual inflation rate by collecting the price of 700 goods and services at various locations and online, but says it wants to know more about price movements and how spending habits are changing.

Almost certainly, the next big economic debate will be about whether or not the UK is heading for recession. In 2008, output had already been falling for several months before it was reflected in the quarterly figures for gross domestic product.

Since then, there has been the introduction of monthly GDP figures and since the pandemic the use of experimental figures designed to provide real-time indicators on the state of the economy. These include card payments, the number of people eating out and traffic density.

The common thread that links these three examples is data. Governments have always seen the link between data and policy decisions. William I’s Domesday Book was an early stab at a national audit for 11th-century