New Economic Measures

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article in its April 8 edition called "New Ways to Read Economy: Experts Scour Oddball Data to Help See Trends Before Official Information Is Available." (The link will be available for non-paid subscribers for 7 days only).

I'm quoted in it, but that's not why you should read the article. The point of the piece is that, in the changing/turbulent/volatile economic times we're in, traditional economic measures might be too slow (or antiquated) to tell us what we need to know. So many of us are turning to new data sources that are quicker, localized, and more responsive.

The article begins:

When the city's top economist needs a rough prediction of sales tax revenues, he watches the number of subway passengers emerging from the Powell Street Station on Saturdays.



Ted Egan, chief economist in the San Francisco Controller's Office, said he could wait six months for California to release the detailed sales-tax data he needs for city revenue projections. But it's quicker to look at passenger tallies from the station closest to the Union Square shopping district, which generates roughly 10% of the city's sales-tax revenue. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District releases the data within three days, he said: "Why should I have to wait?"


Mr. Egan is among a growing number of economists and urban planners who scour for economic clues in unconventional urban data—oddball measures of how people are moving, spending and working.

Broadway ticket sales are a favorite indicator for the chief economist of the New York City Economic Development Corp., Francesco Brindisi. He says they are a good gauge of city tourism.

In Jacksonville, Fla., community planner Ben Warner keeps tabs on calls to the city's 2-1-1 hotline for social services. Since late 2008, he has seen spikes in calls for help with food, housing, utilities payments and suicide prevention. It is "direct, real-time monitoring of the economic and social situation," he said.

I'm a big fan of nontraditional indicators -- they force us to look at our communities through fresh eyes.

If you had been called by the reporter (her name is Cari Tuna, and I found her a delightful professional to work with!), what other examples could you have provided?

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Music, Literature, and College Performance

Sometimes we bring up creative indicators that strike our fancy for their unusual use of data to tell an interesting story. This isn't necessarily to suggest that these measures would be great community indicators -- we're not going to add "boxers or briefs" to our community survey any time soon -- but the way in which these measures are constructed can maybe set us thinking about how else we could measure key trends in our own communities outside of the more standard data sets.

The following data set provides that kind of out-of-the-milk-crate thinking. In Music That Makes You Dumb, Virgil Griffith at CalTech examined Facebook data to see what music college students were listening to. In Books That Make You Dumb, he did the same thing (but with books, not music.) (You probably figured that one out without me.)

He took Facebook network stats from 1,352 schools and the top music/books that their students listed as their favorites, and then mashed that data up with average SAT/ACT scores fro those schools, to get a correlation between music or book choices and IQ. (Yes, it's correlation and not causation. He says that a number of times.)

But check out the results -- you can look up your own school and see what the favorites are and how they rank, or you can look up you favorite music/books and see where they are.

Any way you slice it, it's an interesting data set. And you might see a book or a musical group you may want to try out.

Increased smartness or improved SAT scores not guaranteed.

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Recession Metrics: Underwear and Donuts

For an interesting look at key indicators of economic well-being, see this article from TIME Magazine's Brad Tuttle. In it, he refers to this Washington Post graphic/article on an Underwear Index, showing that as times get tough, men wear underwear longer and the sales of this clothing necessity dip.

Tuttle also (in another blog article) highlights the things we buy more of during a recession.

It's another creative indicator set ... but I don't think we'll be using this indicator in our community reports any time soon.

Please keep sending me the interesting metrics you find out there!

(Hat tip goes to Elaine Pace)

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New Community Indicators

I'm always excited when I run across new ideas for community indicators, or new ways at getting at interesting information.

The Freakonomics blog suggested we take a look at The Mailman Index of Economic Indicators (yes, I know Mail Carrier has been the preferred term for over a decade, but that's what they called it.) Here's what they have to suggest:

If you live in a neighborhood hard hit by the financial crisis, chances are your mailman is seeing a spike in overdraft letters, collection notices, and overdue utility bills. Another bad sign: more names on fewer mailboxes — a hint that families and friends are doubling up to save money. Your mailman is probably also seeing a drop-off in the number of unsolicited credit card offers as the credit crisis deepens.

A reader of their blog suggests a different economic indicator: availability of parking spaces around neighborhood high schools. His(?) anecdotal observations suggest that fewer students drive their own cars to school during economic downturns, and more drive (and take up all the available spaces, spreading into the surrounding neighborhood and those durn kids should just git off his lawn!)

Keep those innovative suggestions for community indicators coming! (My favorite is still female bicyclists as measures of urban sprawl, safety, public health, and democratization of society ... but pickups and politics was fun as well. I'm sure better ideas are just around the corner.)

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Pick-ups and Politics

I don't know if you've been following this series of indicators that tries to define which U.S. states are most like Pennsylvania. This is an interesting use of unusual indicators to define community.

In the first blog entry, Brian Schaffner looks at pick-up truck ownership and shopping at Wal-Mart. Conclusions? "As you can see from the figure, the percentage of Wal-Mart shoppers in a state is related to the percentage of pickup truck owners."

In the second post, the key indicators are "the percentage of citizens in each state who watch PBS (at least occasionally) and the percentage who say that they are invested in the stock market."

The third post compares indicators of gun ownership and feelings toward Jon Stewart. And this post puts it all together.

I don't know how many of you are currently using any of these six indicators for your community. I share them with you for two reasons: first, because the analysis of which state is "most like" Pennsylvania is interesting, and second, because sometimes we need to think differently about how to measure trends in our communities. (Like riding bicycles.)

Anyone have other examples of unusual indicators we should pay attention to?

(Hat tip: The Numbers Guy)

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How Creative Is Your County?

When Richard Florida first began talking about the Creative Class, it appeared to be an urban phenomenon (with some nods to college towns). Now David McGranhan and Timothy Wojan suggest that creative class indicators can be used to measure both metro and nonmetro counties across the United States.

The authors of this piece use 1990 and 2000 employment classification data to determine total employment, employment in "creative' occupations (scientists, engineers, authors, and artists, or anyone whose occupation requires creative thinking for problem-solving), arts employment, and a "bohemian index" (the share of employment in arts occupations.) Their methodology is available here, as well as their data documentation. For a listing of counties and the data sets for each (look up your own!), click here (Excel file).

I found it interesting to be able to think about rural communities in terms of creativity, and not just urban competitions for who's the hippest. This appears to be a useful beginning for translating a new kind of indicators into the less-urbanized environment. I'm interested in hearing from those who are implementing this idea in their communities, and what they're finding.

If you're interested in exploring "creative class" indicators further, here's a few more data sets to consider:

Patents
NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators
Americans for the Arts' Creative Industries Reports


Hat tip: DocuTicker

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Indicators of Nonprofit Impact

Many of us have tried to find a good indicator or two that describes the nonprofit sector in our community. We try surveys of volunteer activity, measures of philanthropic donations (sometimes from self-reports from federated campaigns, sometimes through IRS records.) Every now and then we conduct an economic impact study and tout the importance of the nonprofit sector.

But the strength of the nongovernmental, not-for-profit, civil sector tends to get missed. We know it's an important factor in the social well-being of the community, in the social capital in the community, in civic engagement, in community health, and more. But strong indicators are few and far between.

Good news is on the horizon. The Miami Herald reports on a new Johns Hopkins study of civil society. From the article:

In the United States, nonprofit groups and volunteers represent 7.2 percent of the gross domestic product -- making the sector larger than the construction, transportation and utilities industries, the study found.

The report, which was released last week, comes after eight nations -- including the United States -- began implementing United Nations' guidelines that measure nonprofit economic contributions, including the value of volunteer work.

''We now have an officially sanctioned method for capturing the economic scale and importance of civil society and volunteering around the world,'' said Lester Salamon, the report's author and the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies. ``What it is revealing is that this set of organizations is far more important than we have realized.''

Read the article for more good news. This may be a beginning for better indicators of the nonprofit sector.

How do you measure nonprofit activity? Share your indicators by commenting on this post.

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Bicycle Indicator Update

Last month we talked about female bicyclists as an indicator of community strength. Now the same indicator is in the news again.

In a New York Times article today, we learn of increased government oppression in Iran. What measures does the author use to make the point? Read for yourself in the opening paragraph:

Rents are soaring, inflation hovers around 17 percent, and 10 million Iranians live below the poverty line. The police said they shut 20 barbershops for men in Tehran last week because they offered inappropriate hairstyles, and women have been banned from riding bicycles in many places, as a crackdown on social freedoms presses on.

So besides a measure of growth management, urban renewal, transportation alternatives, public safety, and public health, female bicyclists are now an indicator of social freedom. Keep me updated on any other uses you find for this indicator!

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Numberpedia

I was excited to read in The Numbers Guy's blog about Numberpedia, an attempt to create a Wikipedia about numbers.

From the article:

The site, launched two weeks ago and still small, aspires to be the Wikipedia of numbers—a place where anyone can contribute (or seek out) statistics about a wide range of topics.

“At its core, it’s a way for people to store statistics that they find online,” says Eric Silverberg, Numberpedia’s creator and a 27-year-old student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Mr. Silverberg has been posting a half few dozen entries each day and has begun promoting the site with emails to fellow MIT students and Stanford University alumni. He says there are a “couple thousand” registered users so far.

Numberpedia is full of promise and pitfalls. Like Wikipedia, each entry is supposed to include a link to source material and there are forums where other users can discuss and question entries. Unlike Wikipedia, a contributor can opt to prevent other users from editing a certain entry. Mr. Silverberg doesn’t guarantee the numbers will be accurate, saying, “It’s up to the user who finds one of these statistics to judge the credibility of the author and the source.”

I went to Numberpedia to see what the excitement was about. It has some interesting numbers on it -- from the fiscal 2008 US defense budget to the sale price of dog-chewed Vick trading cards.

There's some possibilities there, including the ability to create projects and link a series of statistics within them.

It's something to keep your eye on ....

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Indicators of Singles in Communities

Did you catch the article in Forbes listing the top U.S. cities for singles? You can even check out the international ranking of cities by appeal to singles.

What I found interesting wasn't the list -- everyone's got a list these days (it would be interesting to have a list of cities ranked by how many lists they appear on, wouldn't it?) No, what I enjoyed was the methodology. Do you ever read the methodologies behind these lists? Sometimes they surprise you, and sometimes they've got a hidden gem or data source in their index that they'll share with you. I received some critical data one time from the kind people behind the America's Most Literate Cities rankings, and I'll always appreciate their willingness to share.

So here's the methodology behind the rankings. And these are really fun.

First they measured the singles, the "ratio of a metro's population above the age of 15 that has never been married." That's Census data, and not really that exciting, but a necessary data point to begin with.

They had a "Coolness" factor: "We determine coolness by an area's diversity and its number of creative workers (i.e., those whose jobs require creativity, such as artists, scientists, teachers and musicians). Richard Florida and Kevin Stolarick of Catalytix and Carnegie Mellon University gave us the data." I like Richard Florida's work (which doesn't keep me from complaining about the weakness of the data sometimes), but I don't get so jazzed up about Dr. Florida being the arbiter of what's cool. So far, it's just an OK list for me.

Job Growth is next -- obvious, but probably necessary. "Job growth rankings are determined by the projected job growth percentage over the next five years for each metro. Washington, D.C.-based Woods & Poole Economics provided the data."

They add a "Buzz factor", which I find annoying -- the same kind of thing started a number of arguments in our community when Black Enterprise Magazine named it one of the Top 10 Cities for African Americans. If you have a web-based survey as part of the index, someone's going to try to game it, and someone else isn't going to trust it because they'll think it's been gamed. To Forbes' credit, they let us know that this part is almost meaningless (so why include it?): "The city's buzz factor is determined by the outcome of an interactive poll in which we asked our readers to give a city a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down or a shrug. Buzz is substantially less heavily weighted in determining the final rankings then the other factors."

But then they get to real data, and they source it. Nightlife and Culture seemed like pretty good indicators:

Nightlife: Nightlife is based on the number of restaurants, bars and nightclubs in each standard metropolitan area. This year we tweaked our formula to give a higher weighting to restaurants and less to bars and nightclubs. Nightlife data is provided by AOL City Guide/Digital City.

Culture: Our cultural index is determined by ranking and then equally weighting the number of museums, pro sports teams, live theaters and university population in each metro. Data courtesy AOL City Guides/Digital City and McGill University.

Now here's the part I really liked:

Cost Of Living Alone: Our proprietary Cost Of Living Alone index is determined by the average cost of a metro area's apartment rents, Pizza Hut pizza, a movie ticket and six-pack of Heineken. The majority of the raw data was provided by Arlington, Va.-based ACCRA.

Isn't that a more interesting, and probably relevant, indicator? How often do we miss the opportunity to think creatively about a new measure to express something we really want to know about? (I think I would have added "laundromat fees" to the list, just for kicks.)

So check the methodologies behind these kinds of lists, and start thinking creatively. Please share your favorite quirky indicators!

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Odds of Dying and Years of Potential Life Lost

I came across a couple of interesting tools in search of an indicator more meaningful and scalable than life expectancy. The problem with life expectancy as a community indicator is that many communities are simple too small in terms of population to get a meaningful life expectancy with a margin of error small enough to be able to observe differences. There are a number of personal life expectancy calculators available, but they don't usually address community characteristics.

Besides, if you're working on a neighborhood indicator project, do you really want to do this kind of math?

One alternative is to measure Years of Potential Life Lost. The advantages to this measure are that you can deal with smaller populations with fairly real-time data using straightforward calculations. It also gives heavier weight in your community to those who die young. More about this measure can be found here.

The major problem with YPLL as an indicator is that it takes a moment to explain -- the indicator isn't immediately accessible to the reader/viewer. A different measure, Odds of Dying, has the advantage of grabbing the imagination quickly.

The National Safety Council and National Geographic published a chart on the odds of dying. As the great American philosopher Jim Morrison reminds us, the odds of dying are 1:1 -- "no one here gets out alive." But how we go -- now that's interesting.

Swivel has the data sets available for the NSC calculations for you to play with. You can also see sample charts people have created using the data. For a different tabular list of the data, see this site.

Of course, you can take odds-of-dying calculations to the ridiculous, as these folks have done. but what I think is interesting is using the methodology to look at causes of deaths in your community and the odds of dying. You could use rolling averages if necessary to examine gender or racial disparities in odds of dying.

Have you used these measures before? What do you think about their possibilities?

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Indicators on Two Wheels: Measuring Bicycles?

Some time back, I had run across a MySpace page arguing that bicyclists are social indicators.

I had thought this interesting, and began an article about it, but once you got past the first sentence or two, there wasn't much more to be said -- I thought.

For the record, here's the first couple sentences of the MySpace article: "Bicyclists are social indicators. The number of people riding and commuting by bicycle can tell us something about the communities in which we live in." While I suspected that was true, I wasn't quite sure what that "something" was.

After all, in one part of the area I live in, we have an extraordinarily high number of accidents involving bicyclists. Anecdotally, I've been told by someone working in the field that the number of bicycle accidents are proportional to DUI's resulting in suspended licenses, leading to a rise of "bicycling while intoxicated" that can be more deadly than being back behind the wheel, though less of a threat to others. But I don't think that's the "something" that the number-of-bicyclists indicator would tell us.

Then I ran across Richard Layman's blog. He references a Sacramento Bee article called Cycle City? in which Peter Jacobsen "points to a key 'indicator species,' the female cyclist. Their numbers on the road, he argues, are a direct measure of the perceived safety of cycling and its likelihood to catch on with the general population."

Bicyclists as a measure of the popularity of bicycling doesn't seem like such an exciting indicator. But bicyclists as a measure of perceptions of safety and of urban renewal and the development of neighborhoods? That's a lot more interesting.

Richard Layman continues:

And midtown is a logical incubator for cycling. It's where trips tend to be shorter and more easily manageable on two wheels. Midtown is packed with destinations for younger folks, with lots of restaurants, bars and nightclubs. In my own informal survey of these young cruisers, cycling was cited as a great way to avoid DUIs when you're enjoying midtown's nightlife.

They also mention greater ease of parking. And of course midtown's numerous bike lanes -- with more on the way -- contribute a sense of safety. But I think the key element is the compactness of midtown.

Now we're getting somewhere. (And the DUI's got thrown in too!) But cycling as an indicator of responsible, compact development patterns and smart growth management is intriguing. And cyclists as a measure of how well a community is attracting the creative class is another. And I'm sure there are community health implications in a rise in cyclists as well.

One more point: Layman suggests that it isn't just bicyclists, but female bicyclists, that serve as a good leading indicator.

This is analogous to the point I make that since women conduct upwards of 80% of all retail transactions, commercial districts that are unsafe and dirty don't stand a chance. See "The presence of women as indicators of revitalization success."

Gender equity. Economic vitality. Safety. Health. Growth management. What an opportunity for a simple measurement to tell lots of stories!

What do you think? Do you use measures of cyclists as part of a community indicators set? Is it a good idea?

Update: Be sure to check out this post on further uses of bicycles as a community indicator!

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