A Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should undertake a new strategy to modernize the Consumer Price Index by accelerating its use of new data sources and developing price indexes based on different income levels, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The Consumer Price Index is the most widely used measure of inflation in the U.S. It is used to determine cost-of-living allowances and, importantly, influences monetary policy, among many other private- and public-sector applications. The new report, Modernizing the Consumer Price Index for the 21st Century, says the index has traditionally relied on field-generated data, such as prices observed in person at grocery stores or major retailers. These data have become more challenging and expensive to collect, and the availability of vast digital sources of consumer price data presents an opportunity. BLS has begun tapping into these data and has said its objective is to switch a significant portion of its measurement to nontraditional and digital data sources by 2024.

“The enormous economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic presents a perfect case study for the need to rapidly employ new data sources for the Consumer Price Index,” said Daniel E. Sichel, professor of economics at Wellesley College, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. “Modernizing the Consumer Price Index can help our measurement of household costs and inflation be more accurate, timelier, and ultimately more useful for policymakers responding to rapidly changing economic conditions.”..
The report says BLS should embark on a strategy of accelerating and enhancing the use of scanner, web-scraped, and digital data directly from retailers in compiling the Consumer Price Index. Scanner data — recorded at the point of sale or by consumers in their homes — can expand the variety of products represented in the Consumer Price Index, and better detect shifts in buying patterns. Web-scraped data can more nimbly track the prices of online goods, and goods where one company dominates the market. Permanently automating web-scraping of price data should be a high priority for the Consumer Price Index program, especially for food, electronics, and apparel, the report says.

Embracing these alternative data sources now will ensure that the accuracy and timeliness of the Consumer Price Index will not be compromised in the future, the report adds. Moreover, accelerating this process will give BLS time to carefully assess new data sources and methodologies before taking the decision to incorporate them in the official index….(More)”

Roe draft raises concerns data could be used to identify abortion seekers, providers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Chris Mills Rodrigo: “Concerns that data gathered from peoples’ interactions with their digital devices could potentially be used to identify individuals seeking or performing abortions have come into the spotlight with the news that pregnancy termination services could soon be severely restricted or banned in much of the United States.

Following the leak of a draft majority opinion indicating that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established the federal right to abortion, privacy advocates are raising alarms about the ways law enforcement officials or anti-abortion activists could make such identifications using data available on the open market, obtained from companies or extracted from devices.

“The dangers of unfettered access to Americans’ personal information have never been more obvious. Researching birth control online, updating a period-tracking app or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement to The Hill. 

Data from web searches, smartphone location pings and online purchases can all be easily obtained with little to no safeguards.

“Almost everything that you do … data can be captured about it and can be fed into a larger model that can help somebody or some entity infer whether or not you may be pregnant and whether or not you may be someone who’s planning to have an abortion or has had one,” Nathalie Maréchal, senior policy manager at Ranking Digital Rights, explained. 

There are three primary ways that data could travel from individuals’ devices to law enforcement or other groups, according to experts who spoke with The Hill.

The first is via third party data brokers, which make up a shadowy multibillion dollar industry dedicated to collecting, aggregating and selling location data harvested from individuals’ mobile phones that has provided unprecedented access to the daily movements of Americans for advertisers, or virtually anyone willing to pay…(More)”.

Taking Transparency to the Next Level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by USAID: “In order for us all to work better together, foreign assistance data — how and where the U.S. government invests our foreign assistance dollars — must be easily, readily, and freely available to the public, media, and our international partners.

To uphold these core values of transparency and openness, USAID and the U.S. Department of State jointly re-launched ForeignAssistance.gov.

This one-stop-shop helps the American taxpayer and other stakeholders understand the depth and breadth of the U.S. Government’s work in international development and humanitarian assistance, so that how much we invest and where and when we invest it is easier to access, use, and understand.

The new ForeignAssistance.gov provides a wealth of global information (above) as well as specific details for countries (below).

The new, consolidated ForeignAssistance.gov is a visual, interactive website that advances transparency by publishing U.S. foreign assistance budget and financial data that is usable, accurate, and timely. The site empowers users to explore U.S. foreign assistance data through visualizations, while also providing the flexibility for users to create custom queries, download data, and conduct analyses by country, sector, or agency…(More)”.

Trust but Verify: Validating New Measures for Mapping Social Infrastructure in Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Timothy Fraser et al: “Scholars and policymakers increasingly recognize the value of social capital – the connections that generate and enable trust among people – in responding to and recovering from shocks and disasters. However, some communities have more social infrastructure, that is, sites that produce and maintain social capital, than others. Community centers, libraries, public pools, and parks serve as locations where people can gather, interact, and build social ties. Much research on urban spaces relies on Google maps because of its ubiquity and this article tests the degree to which it can accurately, reliably, and effectively capture social infrastructure. In this study, we map the social infrastructure of Boston using Google Maps Places API and then ground truth our measures, mapping social infrastructure on street corners with in-person site observations to evaluate the accuracy of available data. We find that though we may need to use multi-vectored measurement when trying to capture social infrastructure, Google maps serve as reliable measurements with a predictable, acceptable margin of error…(More)”.

Unmet Desire

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by I vividly remember March 2020, the month the United States shut down as COVID-19 spread uncontrollably and upended daily life. At the time, I worked at Cornell University in upstate New York. As we adjusted to a new normal, my Cornell colleague Elizabeth Day and I suspected that local leaders were facing unprecedented policy challenges that were not making the major headlines.

We decided to reach out to county policymakers throughout upstate New York, inviting them to share challenges they were facing. We offered to discuss research that might prove helpful. Responses soon poured in.

One county executive was trying to figure out how to provide childcare for first responders. Childcare centers were ordered closed, but first responders could not stay home to watch their kids. The executive needed systematic research on other options. A second local policymaker watched as her county’s offices shuttered and work moved online; she needed research on how other local leaders had used mobile vans to provide necessary services to rural residents without internet. Another county official sought to design a high-quality survey to elicit frank responses from municipal leaders about COVID-related challenges. In this case, she needed to discuss the fundamentals of survey design and implementation with an expert.

These responses led us to engage in an informal collaboration with each of these policymakers. By informal collaboration, I mean a collaborative exchange in which people with diverse forms of knowledge, expertise, and lived experience share what they know with the goal of developing an expanded understanding of a problem—yet still remain autonomous decisionmakers. In these cases, we as researchers brought knowledge about policy analysis and survey fundamentals, and the policymakers brought detailed knowledge about their present needs, local context, and historical challenges. All this diverse information was crucial to chart a way forward that was informed by evidence.

Yet it turns out our interactions were highly unusual. During our conversations, all the policymakers revealed that researchers from colleges and universities in their immediate area had never reached out in this way, and that they had no regular communication with local researchers.

This disconnect is a problem. Local policymakers are responsible for almost $2 trillion of spending annually, and they oversee many areas in which technical knowledge is essential, such as promoting economic development, building and maintaining roads, educating children, policing, fighting fires, determining acceptable land use, and providing public transportation…(More)”.

The Accountable Bureaucrat

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anya Bernstein and Cristina Rodriguez: “Common wisdom has it that, without close supervision by an elected official, administrative agencies are left unaccountable to the people they regulate. For both proponents and detractors of the administrative state, agency accountability thus hangs on the concentrated power of the President. This Article presents a different vision. Drawing on in-depth interviews with officials from numerous agencies, we argue that everyday administrative practices themselves support accountability—an accountability of a kind that elections alone cannot achieve. The electoral story focuses on the aspect of accountability that kicks in as a sanction after decisions have already been made. We propose instead that the ongoing justification of policy positions to multiple audiences empowered to evaluate and challenge them forms the heart of accountability in a republican democracy. The continual process of reason-giving, testing, and adaptation instantiates the values that make accountability normatively attractive: deliberation, inclusivity, and responsiveness.

Our interviews reveal three primary features of the administrative state that support such accountability. First, political appointees and career civil servants, often presented as conflictual, actually enact complementary decisionmaking modalities. Appointees do not impose direct presidential control but imbue agencies with a diffuse, differentiated sense of abstract political values. Civil servants use expertise and experience to set the parameters within which decisions can be made. The process of moving these differing but interdependent approaches toward a decision promotes deliberation. Second, agencies work through a networked spiderweb of decisionmaking that involves continual justification and negotiation among numerous groups. This claim stands in stark contrast to the strict hierarchy often attributed to government bureaucracy: we show how the principal-agent model, frequently used to analyze agencies, obscures more than it reveals. The dispersion of decisionmaking power, we claim, promotes pluralistic inclusivity and provides more support for ongoing accountability than a concentration in presidential hands would. Finally, many two-way avenues connect agencies to the people and situations they regulate. Those required by law, like notice-and-comment rulemaking, supplement numerous other interaction formats that agencies create. These multiple avenues support agency responsiveness to the views of affected publics and the realities of the regulated world….(More)”.

Opening Up to Open Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Chelle Gentemann, Christopher Erdmann and Caitlin Kroeger: “The modern Hippocratic Oath outlines ethical standards that physicians worldwide swear to uphold. “I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk,” one of its tenets reads, “and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.”

But what form, exactly, should knowledge-sharing take? In the practice of modern science, knowledge in most scientific disciplines is generally shared through peer-reviewed publications at the end of a project. Although publication is both expected and incentivized—it plays a key role in career advancement, for example—many scientists do not take the extra step of sharing data, detailed methods, or code, making it more difficult for others to replicate, verify, and build on their results. Even beyond that, professional science today is full of personal and institutional incentives to hold information closely to retain a competitive advantage.

This way of sharing science has some benefits: peer review, for example, helps to ensure (even if it never guarantees) scientific integrity and prevent inadvertent misuse of data or code. But the status quo also comes with clear costs: it creates barriers (in the form of publication paywalls), slows the pace of innovation, and limits the impact of research. Fast science is increasingly necessary, and with good reason. Technology has not only improved the speed at which science is carried out, but many of the problems scientists study, from climate change to COVID-19, demand urgency. Whether modeling the behavior of wildfires or developing a vaccine, the need for scientists to work together and share knowledge has never been greater. In this environment, the rapid dissemination of knowledge is critical; closed, siloed knowledge slows progress to a degree society cannot afford. Imagine the consequences today if, as in the 2003 SARS disease outbreak, the task of sequencing genomes still took months and tools for labs to share the results openly online didn’t exist. Today’s challenges require scientists to adapt and better recognize, facilitate, and reward collaboration.

Open science is a path toward a collaborative culture that, enabled by a range of technologies, empowers the open sharing of data, information, and knowledge within the scientific community and the wider public to accelerate scientific research and understanding. Yet despite its benefits, open science has not been widely embraced…(More)”

Beyond ‘X Number Served’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mona Mourshed: “Metrics matter, but they should always be plural. Focus on the speedometer, ignore the gas gauge, and you’re sure to stop short of your destination. But while the plague of metric monomania can occasionally be an issue in business, it’s an even bigger problem within the social sector. After all, market discipline forces business leaders to weigh tradeoffs between costs and sales, or between product quality and service level speed. Multiple metrics help executives get the balance right, even as they scale.

By contrast, nonprofits too often receive (well-intended) guidance from stakeholders like funders and board members to disproportionately zero in on a single goal: serving the maximum number of beneficiaries. That’s a perfectly understandable impulse, of course. But it confuses scale with just one impact dimension, reach. “We have to recognize that a higher number does not necessarily indicate transformation,” says Lisha McCormick, CEO of Last Mile Health, which supports countries in building strong community health systems. “Higher reach alone does not equate to impact.”

This is a problem because excessively defining and valuing programs by the number of people they serve can give rise to unintended consequences. Nonprofit leaders can find themselves discussing how to serve more people through “lighter touch” models or debating ambiguous metrics like “reached” or “touched” to expand participant numbers (while fighting uneasiness about the potential adverse implications for program quality)…(More)”.

Guns, Privacy, and Crime

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Paper by Alessandro Acquisti & Catherine Tucker: “Open government holds promise of both a more efficient but more accountable and transparent government. It is not clear, however, how transparent information about citizens and their interaction with government, however, affects the welfare of those citizens, and if so in what direction. We investigate this by using as a natural experiment the effect of the online publication of the names and addresses of holders of handgun carry permits on criminals’ propensity to commit burglaries. In December 2008, a Memphis, TN newspaper published a searchable online database of names, zip codes, and ages of Tennessee handgun carry permit holders. We use detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for the city of Memphis to estimate the impact of publicity about the database on burglaries. We find that burglaries increased in zip codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized….(More)”

AI & Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Issue of Daedalus edited by James Manyika: “AI is transforming our relationships with technology and with others, our senses of self, as well as our approaches to health care, banking, democracy, and the courts. But while AI in its many forms has become ubiquitous and its benefits to society and the individual have grown, its impacts are varied. Concerns about its unintended effects and misuses have become paramount in conversations about the successful integration of AI in society. This volume explores the many facets of artificial intelligence: its technology, its potential futures, its effects on labor and the economy, its relationship with inequalities, its role in law and governance, its challenges to national security, and what it says about us as humans…(More)” See also https://aiethicscourse.org/