Because We Need Good Data to Predict the Future

Where do you live? How old are you? Did you finish college? Are you married? Do you have any children? Have you recently moved? What type of job do you have? These may seem like mundane questions, but to demographers the answers yield data that are critical to understanding today’s society and predicting the future.

For 95 years, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has used demographic data to help people make informed decisions that affect communities around the world. PRB works in partnership with the Population Association of America and the Association of Population Centers to make population research accessible to a broad audience.

Just as roads and bridges are fundamental to our physical infrastructure, demographic information is vital to our data and policy infrastructure. Demography provides a lens that community leaders, policymakers, business leaders, advocates, and residents can use to allocate resources effectively and plan for a thriving future.

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Because Improving the Lives of Children is Complicated

For empirical researchers in the social and behavioral sciences who focus on children, adolescents, and young adults, high-quality survey data are an essential ingredient for studying important scientific and policy research questions. Such data are a public good and foundational infrastructure for the social and behavioral sciences. They are the equivalent of the Hubble Telescope for researchers across all career stages—but especially for new and early-stage investigators. Survey data are typically offered to the research community as a free and shared resource that can answer an untold number of questions. Recent budget cutbacks, however, threaten the future of these essential data.

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Because Institutional Racism Exacerbates our Health and Economic Challenges

The COVID-19 epidemic is hitting African Americans particularly hard. As of this writing, 70% of all COVID-19 deaths in Louisiana are black residents in a state where only one-third of the population is black. To date, few states have released COVID-19 data by race, but the scant available information reveals that African Americans in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit are being infected with and dying of COVID-19 at disproportionate rates.

Could the effects of historic and modern-day discrimination be contributing to these stunning statistics? In New Orleans, a city that is nearly 60% African American and has a small but growing Hispanic population, where the COVID-19 death rate is on a par per capita with New York City's, the answer is likely yes.

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Because It Makes Informed Democracy Possible

Einstein said famously, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” It gives scientific optimists like me encouragement that great thinkers have concluded it is possible to understand the world, that the world is not chaotic, senseless, and inscrutable. In the empirical world there is a means for determining which of two ideas, explanations, or choices is more likely to be true. Through observation, experiment, and analysis there is a path to reliable knowledge. By going down that path we can gain knowledge that is more and more reliable. If only more people realized this! This is not only, as in Einstein’s words, mysterious that it should be so; it is also astounding. And this is comforting, because it also appears to be true that with reliable knowledge one can improve the human condition, reduce suffering and affliction, and ennoble human life. This is the testament of science. Science, the greatest intellectual development of the past half millennium, brings many material advances, but the greatest gift of science is the idea of science itself.

I suppose some would say I am going off the deep end in idle philosophy, but it seems to me very empowering in a practical sense to know how useful the well-developed practices and standards of science (social science and the scientific techniques of other disciplines) are for resolving many differences of opinion. How very empowering it is to know that there can be and is progress toward a self-consistent and improving understanding of people and things.

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