Evolving Knowledge Regimes: Economic Inequality and the Politics of Statistics in the United Kingdom since the Postwar Era

Abstract

This article explores the history of statistical knowledge about economic inequality in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the twentieth century. It presents a chronology of knowledge regimes that underwent several transformations from the postwar knowledge regime to the social-democratic knowledge regime in the mid-1970s to the neoliberal knowledge regime in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it highlights the dominating position of civil servants and government statisticians in shaping official statistics that informed public debates, imaginations of society, and political decision making on issues of poverty, income, and wealth distribution. Methodologically, the article contends that the concept of knowledge regimes provides a useful analytical tool to investigate changing historical configurations of knowledge production. Analyzing knowledge regimes focuses attention on historical social orders, practices, norms, hierarchies of authority, and power relations that have bearing on the production and dissemination of knowledge. The article argues that developing the analytical tool kit will also help to build a more distinctive profile for the history of knowledge as a historical subdiscipline.