Is data making us dumber?
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, December 3 2009
CAP's Matt Yglesias argues that the growing trend towards greater political transparency and open data might actually make we the people even less knowledgeable about how government works. Fueling Yglesias's skepticism is a recent Politico article that used new data on House office expenditures released by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that aims to profile the "personalities and priorities" of the hundreds of offices that make up the House, a piece that leads with careful consideration of the fact that Pelosi herself spent just under $3,000 on flowers in the covered time period and Jim Clyburn spent $265 at a donut shop. Donuts are funny. Jim Clyburn eating donuts even funnier. But many thinking people would argue that where money gets spent in Congress has more meaningful aspects than pastry budgets. For example, Yglesias argues that "Since the 'bulk' [of office budgets] goes to salaries, it might be nice to tell us exactly how much (55 percent? 74 percent?) or something about how much congressional staff gets paid."
But the logical error here might be in expecting that sort of analysis of government data to come from Politico, which fuels its successful business model by underwriting solid reporting with link-grabbing copy. (You need look no further than Click.) In the future, our analysts and our analysis might come from elsewhere. The Sunlight Foundation*, for example, not only turned the House's pdf disbursements records into a searchable database, its team of researchers has been chewing through the House expenditure data to get at some meaningful, truly informative conclusions.
In fact, Sunlight's Open House Project team just did pretty much what Matt was after -- an analysis of what House staffers get paid, averaging it out by position. What would also be interesting would be to look at the disparities in funding between backbenchers and House leadership, as a way of framing how seniority and power shape how the institution functions. Or from other angles: there's a conventional wisdom that has floated around that Republicans on the Hill do more to nurture their young. Is that borne out by the data? In other words, Sunlight found that staff assistants in the House make an average of about $29,890, but do Democratic staff assistants get paid less than their counterparts on the other side of the aisle? Also, how do House committee budgets, which do vary pretty widely, match up with that committee's footprint on the Hill?
But that sort of edifying use of newly-freed government data might more readily be found at advocacy-minded non-profits than at news publications trying to stay afloat in today's online media world. Not seeing it in Politico doesn't mean that it isn't actually playing out elsewhere.
*Note: Our Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are senior advisors to the Sunlight Foundation.