Michael Hicks is the George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of economics and the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University. His column appears in Indiana newspapers.
For anyone really interested in public policy or the economy, the information revolution of the past two decades has been a blessing. The ease of obtaining data, the availability and richness of information and the growing application of data-intensive analysis offers great opportunities to better understand our world.
As an undergraduate student in the 1980s, I was master of something called a card catalog. My school’s library displayed large oak cabinets filled with index cards that allowed me to cross reference studies and data sources housed deep within the library. Within years, electronic databases and finally the Internet have wholly replaced this technology. As a researcher it is pretty obvious how this helps my work, but what does it do for folks just interested in public policy?
Let us suppose you saw a study on tax increment financing reported in your local paper. Well then, you could go directly to Google Scholar and find hundreds of studies on the subject. Or, imagine that you read this column’s insightful observations about declining enrollment at teachers colleges and were shocked and angered to hear that you were misled about a decline in teachers’ salaries in Indiana. Instead of penning a fact-starved obloquy for your local paper, you could go directly to the State Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates data at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and see for yourself in the data that I was correct.
Most federal and state data are easy to download and access; all you need is an Internet connection, a computer and the technology skills of a Hoosier middle school student.
Data has also become a lot more useful over the past couple decades. My favorite example is a database that reports the number of new jobs created and destroyed in each county, every three months. In years past we knew the number of net new jobs, but now we can tell exactly how good our economic developers are doing at attracting jobs without having to rely upon dubious self-reported job numbers. Across the country, state governments and think tanks are busily creating publicly available data sources that open a huge window into the previously mysterious operations of government, education and the economy.
The biggest impact of all of this isn’t just that data is easier to obtain or that we have a more transparent view into government and the economy. The real benefit is that we can ask and answer more relevant questions about our world. This explosion of inquiry will prove disquieting to many folks who have been able to hide behind a veil of translucent information about their work. It will also mean that all educated people of the future will have to understand some statistical modeling, if they care to understand the world around them.
We are already seeing a revolution in the way we judge how well schools and colleges prepare students, how efficient local governments are and how effective economic development policies are in improving the economy. No wonder the new data scares so many folks.