White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room

Here's a link to the White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room

Their purpose is to provide easy access to current Federal economic indicators drawn from a a number of different Federal agencies. Categories of data include:

• Employment
  
• Income
• International
• Money
• Output
• Prices
• Production
• Transportation

This is a nice idea but the navigation, the selection of key performance indicators, and some of the presentational choices made for each chart leaves some room for improvement.

Navigation: For example the Employment link provides access to 8 metrics and one might imagine that someone interested getting a sense of how things are going with regard to employment might actually want to look at all 8.

To accomplish you click on the employment link which brings up a web page that lists the 8 factors but due to the layout of the page, it takes almost two full screens to see the eight factors. Each factor has a chart icon to click on so you can see the actual chart.

The icon is large enough in size so that it would have been big enough to give a useful small size version of the chart. Amazingly, when you click on the icon, instead of getting the full size version of the chart, you get an intermediate screen that tells you that you are exiting the White House Server. After a 5+ second delay you are redirected to the chart.

So to look at all 8 charts that were picked to represent the most important employment related factors, you have to navigate up back and forth with the redirection delay in the middle. Not a lot of fun.

If you want to look at all the key indicators from all the categories, there is a whole lot of clicking and mousing and redirect delays ahead of you.

Contrast this to the St. Louis Fed approach of combining all the key indicators at a given point in time into a single PDF document. My take is that the PDF format is much kinder to the prospective reader/viewer and that it is much more likely to be examined and used.

It would be great if there were an option to download a single PDF or PowerPoint document that had all the charts from all the different categories so that the viewer could simply scroll through each chart and thereby obtain a composite, gestalt view of the state of the economy.

Why Wait Till September in Iraq

We Don't Have To Wait. There's a dangerous meme circulating that says we have to wait till September before we can learn whether the "surge" in Iraq is working. This, in my opinion is simply not true.

Many dimensions of the current situation in Iraq can and are being measured and reported on in near real time. The work of Michael O'Hanlon on the weekly Iraq Index at the Brookings Institution is one excellent proof that it is possible to know were we stand literally week by week and even day by day.

Digestible Trend Data. One principal area where we are not as good as we need to be today is in making sure that the trend data that exists is readily available in a form that is digestible by the intended audience. This intended audience includes the Congress, the main stream news media, the blogosphere, and especially ordinary citizens. Some really important data such as the example of Iraqi prison population that we showed in a post earlier today may only appear in tables. My guess is that most people are not willing or able to get what they need directly from the Iraq Index or similar reports. Those who are willing and able may not have nearly enough time. We can and must make it easier so that more citizens can be included in the process.

Assembling All Key Factors in One Place. A second principal impediment is that that the data is dispersed among many sources. We need to pull it all together so that each of us then becomes able to make a reasoned evaluation of how we are doing right now (without waiting till September) . My efforts at assembling some key trend graphs in a series of posts today and in the summary zip file is a small demonstration of what is possible.

Identifying and Acquiring Any Missing but Still Important Factors. A third thing holding us back from being able to evaluate for ourselves how things are going right now is that some key factors are not being reported in easily findable places.

Twenty First Century Visualization Tools. The fourth factor limiting our possibilities today is that most trend data is presented statically. This severely limits the number of factors that an ordinary person is going to be willing and able to look at to only a handful. On the other hand, with a modern Trend Visualization Viewing Station on the order of what's already available for stock market data from the likes of Big Charts or Prophet Net means that ordinary folk can look at and understand dozens and dozens of factors in a very short space of time.

We Don't Have to Wait. All these difficulties that are blocking us can be remedied without waiting till September. Our failure to remedy them over the past four years meant that it took that long for it to sink in that what we were doing wasn't really working. It's easy to posture that everything is ok when there is no hard data to prove you wrong.

In fact, if we don't begin to remedy them now, we will be in the same boat come September. We will find that we still do not have our arms around the entire situation. The facts we need will still not have been assembled and reported in an easily digestible way. And it will still be way too easy to claim that things are going well, or that we still don't know enough to tell.

Anyone interested in helping blast our way through these obstacles to understanding where we are in near real time, please let me know so we can join forces and see if we can make a difference.

The Data is Out There. Let's go get it and assemble it and make it easy to use and then share it with all interested parties.

New Development at the St. Louis Fed

Here's the latest on a nice new development from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

St. Louis Fed: March 2007 Tip of the Month

It's now possible for registered users of their FRED database to create, name and save customized graphs that can then automatically be updated on later visits to the site. Looks like a great feature.

Iraq Trend Data Set now posted to Swivel and Many Eyes

A while back we mentioned the great new data sharing and visualization web site called Many Eyes and we pointed out an Iraq Trend data set we had uploaded so that others could more readily examine and analyze it.

We've recently come across another great new data sharing and visualization web site called Swivel and have uploaded the same data set there for comparison purposes at: http://www.swivel.com/data_sets/show/1004780.

Both Many Eyes and Swivel fall into a category I have started calling Trend Visualization Appliances. The amazing Gapminder work also fits into this category as do all the various stock market visualization tools currently available.

The old fashioned form of trend visualization appliances (e.g. a standard report including graphical output) can still be pretty useful when managed carefully. For further comparison, here is the link to a PDF report that graphically presents the same data - vizualizing-trends-ohanlon-testimony.pdf.

Similarly, for data sharing, the old fashioned URL links to csv files offer an alternative to the WEB 2.0 mechanisms such as Many Eyes and Swivel. Here's the Iraq trend data the old fashioned way: ohanlon-key-factors.csv

So many choices, so little time. How can we decide which is best for our purposes?

I'll be revisiting this topic, but for now, my own criteria for deciding which tools I will use at a given moment are:
1) ease of use,
2) shortness of learning curve, and
3) personal productivity and time saving -- the speed at which I can navigate through complex trend data sets to discover previously hidden patterns.

What do you think?