The Audacity of Data?

[sueragingroz]

Has anyone read this?

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a

It's pretty dry... but it's interesting... it explains a lot about the contrasts and comparisons between the Bill Clinton policy wonks and the Obama policy wonks and what "change" really means...

Here's an excerpt:

One major reason for these differences is the candidate himself. Cutler told me Obama is adamant about consulting bona fide experts. "The staff kept saying, 'What he wants to know is that he's really talking to experts in the field. When you go see him, you know, make it clear that you're an expert.'" When it comes to economics, it's very difficult to achieve expertise without an academic background. It's a field that prizes rigorous results, supported by reams of painstakingly sifted data. (Though Reich was labor secretary, he was trained as a lawyer, not an economist.) Cutler, for example, has made his name with a series of detailed econometric studies suggesting that, contrary to the conventional wisdom on the left, Americans actually have quite a bit to show for the trillions they spend on health care.

Even a very smart non-academic can come up short by this measure. Last year, Goolsbee participated in a panel discussion with the economic advisers of the major presidential campaigns. At one point, he acknowledged the two other academics in the room and noted their dependence on intricate census data. This prompted some grumbling from the other advisers--very accomplished wonks in their own right--which the moderator acknowledged. But the truth is that almost no non-PhD would know what to do with such elaborate data sets. Or take the latest advances in behavioral economics: "We're aware of that stuff, we read the literature, believe a lot of it," says one Obama adviser. "That stuff hasn't filtered to the Washington policy community yet."