From the Financial Times
Data impel economists to leave their armchairs at last
By Tim Harford
If Hollywood is to be believed, every mad scientist who ever lived has a laboratory full of bubbling flasks, flashing consoles and glowing orbs. Science writer Philip Ball — who has visited countless research labs — tells me that reality is not so very different: the gear may be more subdued, but the gear is always there...
What, then, of economics? Economics has its own quasi-Nobel Prize, but it is a stretch to find a single example of a prize being awarded for the development of new tools or instruments. Simon Kuznets (laureate in 1971) probably has the best such claim, for developing the ideas behind the gross domestic product measure. Alas, GDP is a broad aggregate with limitations that Kuznets himself understood all too well...
An even bigger change is that economists are using administrative data. I realise that “economists are using administrative data” is a contender for the most boring sentence uttered in 2018. But over the past two decades or so, this has been a quietly revolutionary move...
A third measurement tool is the mobile phone. Every time a call is placed, the phone company generates a record of who called whom, when, for how long, and where the phones were, sometimes to within less than a hundred metres.
With that kind of “metadata”, economists and other researchers can ask questions such as: how rapidly are people moving around, and to what extent is that correlated with the spread of an epidemic? Is a city’s transport infrastructure working well? How quickly are refugees integrating into a new society?
This is both an opportunity and a challenge for economists. Data scientist and economist Josh Blumenstock told me that “anyone who graduated with an economics PhD more than five years ago has no idea how to handle this data, and is frantically scrambling.”
Joshua Blumenstock is an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where he directs the Data-Intensive Development Lab.
