Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Trump Administration and Data

This podcast is a few weeks old now, but the information is still very relevant: Politics Podcast: Data Under Trump. Trump doesn't have a particularly good record with data thus far, but all we know is from Trump as a candidate and then president-elect, not as president. As we keep slouching towards Bethlehem moving closer to the inauguration, these are some important things to keep in mind. 

A few important issues they touch on:
  • A lot of the important economic data used by both policy-makers and politics journalists are generated from survey data - for example, how we get data on inflation
  • Though a lot of the economic data isn't shown to the administration prior to release (preventing any cooking of the data), they can have an impact by starving these groups of funding
  • Making the Census or the American Community Survey, which are both government-run, voluntary will lead to increased costs (and there's a really good reason why)
Great quote from the podcast: "If he really is going to make good on being a law-and-order president, we need to track crimes better [than we currently do]."

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