Tag Archives: longitudinal data

The city of Boston to research, act on data regarding economic inequality

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The city of Boston is taking steps to do its own research regarding troubling inequality within its borders:

And that’s why it’s so interesting that the city is planning to gather and maintain longitudinal data deep into the future that may help explain what’s going on and what policy levers can change the situation. The new cross-agency project, housed in the Mayor’s Office, is called the Economic Mobility Lab, and it has gotten initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation…

You can see the germ of this idea in the Resilient Strategy that the city released a couple of months ago. Deep in the report, it says that “The City will build upon ongoing efforts by utilizing new and existing data sources to advance resilience and racial equity across the city.” The existing data simply won’t tell the story, and so the city will need to find those new sources and incorporate them—and study the results. For years.

Jason Ewas, the executive director of the Economic Mobility Lab, tells me, “We’re going to put a stake in the ground and say that we’re going to study in general how people are moving up and down, or staying the same, and see if we can see why.” This is an explicit vision of tracking and improving economic mobility.

It’s not that the city will stop experimenting with programs or improving what it’s doing in the meantime. “We’re going to do [that] while researching,” Ewas tells me.

To me, the most interesting part of this is that the city is doing the research itself. Boston has numerous research institutions that could do such research but the city wants to take this on themselves. Will they find things that academic researchers would not uncover (either because of their perspectives or because of the data and actors they would have access to)? Or, will the city be unable to separate out their research arm from their political concerns?

Of course, perhaps these questions do not matter if Boston is able to successfully combat economic inequality. Many cities face these issues as they both try to keep up with the higher end of the globalized economy and serve residents who are far removed from the global elite.

Slight uptick in Americans’ confidence in institutions

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The latest results from Gallup suggest the slide in institutional confidence in America has ended:

Americans’ confidence in the nation’s major institutions has edged up in 2017, after registering historical lows over the past three years. Newspapers, public schools and organized labor, in particular, have improved in public esteem. The average percentage of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in 14 institutions is at 35%, up from 31% in 2014 and 32% in 2015 and 2016…

First, the uptick in Republicans’ average confidence resulting from the election of President Trump was not offset by a decrease in confidence among Democrats, leaving the population, as a whole, more confident than in previous years.

Second, despite this increased confidence, Americans are still skeptical of most of the major institutions that make up U.S. society. Major institutions have an average 35% “great deal/quite a lot” confidence rating overall, and only three institutions garner a confidence rating above 50%. Major institutions such as big business, the criminal justice system and banks get high confidence ratings from less than one-third of the public.

Finally, the dismal level of public confidence in Congress — with 12% of Americans saying they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the nation’s legislative body and 44% saying they have very little confidence — highlights what Americans themselves say is the nation’s most important problem: a dysfunctional government that has lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the people it serves.

While the numbers are slightly up in 2017, the summary suggests not a whole lot has changed outside of which party controls the presidency. Overall, Americans are pretty skeptical about most major institutions though their dissatisfaction might be the result of different reasons. At the least, this data may suggest confidence has bottomed out.

This is also another example of why longitudinal data is so helpful. If this was data from a single time point, it is hard to know what it means: is this more or less confidence than normal? How do certain events change the responses? But, with data regarding confidence in 14 institutions since 1993, we can see patterns: upward and downward swings over years, shifts due to social changes like a burst housing bubble, comparisons across very different institutions.