In case you haven't seen it, I think https://www.data.gov/ is an attempt to answer your point about making it "accessible and useful to people." There's room for improvement, but it's a start.
I thought there would be a flood of projects analysing the data when it came out, but it seems like the idea everyone applauded but not much came out of it. Steve Ballmer's http://usafacts.org seems like the first real attempt though.
Is there a HN thread discussing these reports? I'd love to hear folks' opinions about them... Interesting facts to me in the latest report [1]:
- Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data.
- Page 30: "There have been more suicide gun deaths than homicide gun deaths every year since 1981". This is crazy to me given how much we hear about gun homicide being a problem in this country.
- Page 29: Crime rate has declined but "The number of incarcerated persons has increased by 330% since 1980".
>Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data.
Barring some calamity, this is pretty much as expected. Tariffs impact a very small percentage of the economy with large size, and the rest of it with a small overhead, much like a fed interest rate hike. Even with this hawkish fed, there hasn't been anything overly harmful to the economy from a policy perspective.
> This is crazy to me given how much we hear about gun homicide being a problem in this country.
Anything that's politicized gets this special treatment. Kid kills brother with car, blurb in local newspaper. Kid kills brother with gun, national news and Tweets from Presidential candidates.
Texting and driving is as bad as drinking and driving when it comes to number of deaths (dwarfing gun deaths as well), yet people do it like it's no big deal. Most cities still only levy small fines (in comparisons to DUIs) for doing it. Not all accidental death is created equal.
>Page 29: Crime rate has declined but "The number of incarcerated persons has increased by 330% since 1980"
Welcome to the US where the war on drugs gives us authoritarian level incarceration rates.
Every election cycle I look for the candidate with the balls to say the War on Drugs is over, let’s wind this crap down, change our laws to reflect this fact, change some sentences ex post facto to reflect this and get on with our lives.
Every election cycle, I continue to be disppointed. Even if they were crazy in every other regard, I would probably still vote for them. It’s like, Step 1 towards doing anything meaningful in regards to poverty, education, criminal justice reform, et cetera.
USDS/18F have done such incredible work and I'm glad the Trump admin hasn't killed them off completely. Given Trump's total-war attitude toward all Obama initiatives I'm somewhat surprised they still exist and haven't been gutted like CFPB.
honestly, with this administration's turnover and record number of still-unfilled positions, I'd bet there's a very real chance that it still exists because it hasn't been noticed yet. because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing the Trump admin would hate, seeing as how they've already pulled a lot of data out of the public eye like climate change reports, white house visitor logs, etc.