On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
Want to know how many police officers are employed in various parts of the country and compare that against crime rates? Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets and the cost to collect? Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed depression and how much the government spends on it? That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.
This is exactly the kind of thing technology should be used for in a democracy: to provide (relatively) easy insight into otherwise incredibly obtuse and splintered government data. Well done.
I wish we had that…
I never guessed I would be applauding Steve Ballmer for something he did after leaving Microsoft, but it just goes to show you…
From what I understand, he only became interested after losing an argument with his wife over the issue of government help for the poor. If anything, applaud her not only for the spark that generated this project, but for her other philanthropic endeavors as well.
I completely agree. But I guess we need to take it however we can get it. ;^)
It’s an interesting resource, but I was glancing through it and I noticed many of the data points appear to disagree with other sources.
Take for example young adults living with parents, USAFacts claims that’s 15%, but I’ve long heard much higher figures in the 30%s with the lowest point on record closer to 20% in the 1960s.
https://www.usafacts.org/metrics/12855
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/24/for-first-time-in-modern-…
Right now it’s difficult to know where their data comes from because they seem to be lacking specific citations, other than a generic list here:
https://www.usafacts.org/sources
They also talk about their methodology and discuss that there are contradictions within their own data sources:
https://www.usafacts.org/methodology
IMHO it would be much better to let us see all the data rather than just selecting it for us. Still, props to them for admitting it.
This could become a useful tool, at least assuming they start providing citations once it’s out of development. However it could be even more useful if rather than merely cherry picking the data sources to include on the site, they would actually highlight the differences and biases between them objectively. Also I don’t think they’re doing researchers any favors prohibiting non-governmental academic research. If the government numbers don’t match academic numbers, that in itself is worth knowing.
It probably has to do with that qualifier – young adults. Their definition doesn’t match your own. They really need to show more data about the data.
It could also be the definition of living with that skews the data. Perhaps they’re using a tax-based definition where the individual must earn less than ~$4000 per year to qualify as a dependent, and they’re using the dependent status to define the person as living with someone else. Again, we need more data than just a plain figure.
JLF65,
Hopefully that’s coming.
While this sounds promising, this can only lead to decisions based on spreadsheet management. And we’ll probably all have to hear this cited in political arguments for 20 years, even if the data is proven false or horribly outdated.