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SUMMARY:The technocratic empiricism of the Obama administration - Jack Wri
 ght\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
DTSTART:20160503T121000Z
DTEND:20160503T130000Z
UID:TALK65029@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Duncan Needham
DESCRIPTION:In 2008\, future head of the Office of Information and Regulat
 ory Affairs (OIRA)\, Cass Sunstein claimed of a prospective Obama presiden
 cy that: "in his empiricism\, his curiosity\, his insistence on nuance\, a
 nd his lack of dogmatism\, Obama is indeed a sort of anti-Bush." For Sunst
 ein\, and for many others\, an Obama presidency would dispel the instinct 
 and ideology driven policy making of the Bush administration and replace t
 hem with policy making dictated by empiricism. But the empiricism Sunstein
  had in mind was necessarily of a particular sort. It was an empiricism ba
 sed on randomised control trials and data.\n \nIn this paper I will chart 
 the implementation of this new technocratic empiricism. I will outline how
  this new technocratic empiricism became manifest\, particularly around th
 ree different\, but linked\, policy clusters: evidence and behavioural bas
 ed policy\, open government\, and big data. By examining programmatic stat
 ements and policy documents\, I will also explore some of the key ideas be
 hind these changes. This will point towards a set of ideals in which data 
 rules over politics. This rests on a particular idea of what is possible w
 ith data and of what knowledge for policy should look like. This means I w
 ill also explore these changes as examples of Sociotechnical Imaginaries. 
 Through the language of imaginaries\, evidence and behavioural based polic
 y\, open government\, and big data can be drawn together as a new way of r
 eimagining decision making and a new set of relations between state knowle
 dge and the private sector. It is an imagination of a future in which deci
 sions are non-political\, in which optimisation rules over deliberation\, 
 in which problems arising from irrationality are smoothed\, and in which c
 ertain aspects of government are further decentralised.
LOCATION:The Richard King Room\, Darwin College
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