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January 16, 2019 at 11:19 AM
(Photo: Mike Scarcella/ALM)
As America’s partial government shutdown drags on, it’s depriving economists and analysts of their intellectual lifeblood: federal data.
To understand why government data is so crucial, it’s worth looking back to a time before comprehensive federal statistics existed — and fortunately Hugh Rockoff at Rutgers University has a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper out on just that point.
The U.S. has collected census data since 1790, but in Rockoff’s telling, most government indicators emerged as an answer to a Great Depression-era problem: how do you know how income is distributed and how Americans are faring without a central information repository?
Commerce Department statistics on gross domestic product, for instance, have their roots in the 1929-1932 crisis, and “the political point, clearly, was to justify sweeping governmental economic initiatives,” Rockoff writes.
