Heather Boushey

What does it mean to know something about the world?

Usually, I spend my days behind a computer, crunching numbers or writing about my latest findings. But for the past month, I've done something very different. I've (finally, my friends might say) become an organizer (and yes, it is fun). We've brought economists and researchers from around the nation together to protest the President's proposed elimination of a Census Bureau survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Well, okay, you might be thinking, economists like their data, but so what? We live in a nation that will soon have 300,000,000 people. Every day, or so it seems, someone wants to debate economic policy based on anecdote or conjecture about how the economy works. I've heard that inequality "isn't so bad" because "people don't perceive" big differences between themselves and the rich. I've heard that interviews with "scores" of mothers finds them at home with the kids, career dreams in shambles.

But, then I look at the data - from nationally representative surveys with sample sizes in the tens of thousands - and see a different picture. Large (and expensive) government surveys tell us stories about what is going on around us, about the people that we don't know. Income inequality has increased significantly over the past 30-plus years, and people are living in communities that are economically segregated. Some of us live in economically diverse neighborhoods, but most of us do not and thus don't know the experiences of people who don't look like us or who can't afford what we have (or who can afford far more than we could imagine). We live in a nation that spans the width of a continent and to understand it, we need to know more than can be gleamed from the experiences of a handful of people.

In short, having access to large-scale surveys matters for public policy and for public debate. Without it, we cannot understand the world around us. Without it, we cannot understand how policy affects the lives of the people it touches. Without it, we cannot make informed policy choices.

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Posted at 5:00 AM, Mar 08, 2006 in Economic Opportunity
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