> Also, the White House has a strong incentive to keep inflated numbers on
> the website. The error bars on the numbers wildly dwarfed the size of the
> jobs numbers. I mean ... this BS data was literally front and center on the
> recovery.gov website and the WhiteHouse.gov website.
> The White House and the public interest groups actually did the
> transparency movement a fair amount of damage by publishing very dirty day
> and claiming it meant something.
> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Tom Lee <t...@sunlightfoundation.com>wrote:
>> I'm not sure there's much value in cleaning up the data in this way. The
>> "jobs created/saved" field was something that public interest groups asked
>> to be included in ARRA reporting requirements, presumably in part to
>> collect political ammunition to defend the program's effectiveness. But
>> this is not how economists measure the impact of fiscal stimulus.
>> If those responsible for reporting couldn't even manage to enter the data
>> in the right field, you can imagine how inconsistently they approached the
>> problem of estimating how many jobs a grant or contract saved/enabled. And
>> to be fair, it's an almost impossibly difficult question -- imagine trying
>> to estimate this at your own workplace around a single client or grant!
>> What's the counterfactual?
>> Even beyond that, nobody on a given project is going to be able to
>> estimate how many downstream jobs a project enabled through purchases of
>> supplies and services. This is why economists look at macro indicators
>> like unemployment claims instead of trying to suss out the Keynesian
>> multiplier for every expenditure.
>> Anyway! All of this is just to say that I wouldn't pay much attention to
>> the jobs fields in ARRA data. I don't think that reporting requirement
>> accomplished very much except to embarrass the Vice President on the Daily
>> Show:
>> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/11/factchecking-bidens-stim...
>> On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 8:15 AM, Anthea Watson Strong <
>> anthea.wat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> It seems ridiculous that we can't find a cleaned up version of the
>>> Recovery data. I'm sure academics have studied this data or folks have
>>> done some viz work with it.
>>> Someone on this list must know someone who has done the clean-up, am I
>>> wrong?
>>> On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Adam Stalker <astal...@gmail.com>wrote:
>>>> Wondering if anyone has done any cleanup work on the Recovery data from
>>>> the Recovery API. Trying to find categorized projects and pull out job
>>>> numbers when improperly listed in the description instead of the jobs field.
>>>> Any help would be much appreciated.
>>>> Thanks
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