Democratizing Our Data

Book excerpt: Why America's data system is broken, and how to fix it. Why, with data increasingly important, available, valuable and cheap, are the data produced by the American government getting worse and costing more? State and local governments rely on population data from the US Census Bureau; prospective college students and their parents can check data from the National Center for Education Statistics; small businesses can draw on data about employment and wages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But often the information they get is out of date or irrelevant, based on surveys--a form of information gathering notorious for low response rates. In A Data Manifesto, Julia Lane argues that bad data is bad for democracy. Her book is a wake-up call to America to fix its broken public data system.