Helping local leaders reach the most vulnerable

[brooklynite]

Gates Foundation

It is popular these days to boil our vast universe of policy choices down into a single, binary choice: either you’re for public health, or you’re for economic recovery. Obviously, this is a false choice. Not only should we do both, we literally have to, since physically sick people don’t form the basis of a healthy economy and an unhealthy economy makes people physically sick.

In planning for the future, it may be more helpful to think in terms of a spectrum. When it comes to public health and the economy, policymakers face a dizzying number of decisions. The better the data and evidence available to them, the better those decisions will be for tens of millions of Americans who need help.

On the public health side, we see every day how experts can use high-res, real-time data to determine who’s at risk and how to protect them. On the economic recovery side, though, this kind of information simply doesn’t exist. The data in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent “employment situation,” for example, was three weeks old when it came out (and it’s been out for five weeks), and the smallest possible subdivision of analysis was into the 50 states.

One of our grantees, Opportunity Insights, is stepping into this breach by building a fully anonymized data hub called the OI Economic Tracker. This easy-to-use, publicly accessible web platform launches today. The data hub is already able to answer important questions about employment, income, and consumer spending at the county level with just a few days’ lag time. By mid-summer, we hope it will provide data about an even wider range of issues that is disaggregated by race and gender and as granular as the more than 40,000 zip codes in the United States.