Weighty Matters

When leaders and pundits assess the social equity of current or proposed policies, they don't always base their judgments on good information. Information is the mother's milk of policy and political choice.

Put aside the meat of our social equity debates: education opportunities and achievement, universal health insurance, racial discrimination and disparity, immigration reform, lack of progressive taxation, costs and benefits in the wars on crime and terrorism, and environmental justice, to name a few. Apart from partisans at the ideological extremes, everyone should want the light of information and a better analytical infrastructure for thinking about social equity. Imagine where we would be without environmental impact statements, or regulations for scientific research, imperfect as they are. Or, take government's effort to implement the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act and ask, "What next?"

Policymakers rarely get caught up in carefully defining social goals. Politics often requires vagueness, because punting tough questions is a survival tactic. Almost no one opposes social equity, but the devil and the debate are in the details. The people carrying out the policies must get specific if those initiatives are to have consequences. That means three things:

• Identify contexts about which we care most.
• Select dimensions of equity that warrant attention.
• Ensure that supporting data can be gathered with constrained resources.

Choosing social priorities is inescapably political, but a principled approach in an era of divided government would be to build a portfolio of areas, through logrolling, where there is something for everyone. Start with Congress and federal agencies and then spread attention and oversight around in rough proportion to expenditures. This means less analytical attention for a $36 million Housing and Urban Development demonstration project than for a $12 billion entitlement program, or a $5 billion tax expenditure.

As for dimensions and data, think not only about consequences to income and wealth, but also equity across population subgroups. Geography (urban versus rural), race and ethnicity, gender, immigrant status and age are vitally important. These variables could seem key on a superficial level, but getting specific about any of them presents complex choices. Case in point: Aggregating across sharply distinct national origin groups creates debates over categories for racial data, and policy and political distortions.

The subtler issue is change over time. More than the customary plea for good time series data, it requires stepping back and asking whether the engines of opportunity in our society-the institutions and forces that create upward mobility, middle-class security and dignity for elders-are firing on all cylinders or creaking along in the breakdown lane.

Occasionally, attention is drawn to creating social indicators, an intellectually worthy ambition that never has garnered much political support. This is not due so much to inherent methodological challenges, but to the lack of urgency among many decision-makers. The result is an incomplete patchwork of social equity data sources and negligence on the narrower question of evaluating social programs. Proponents of these programs, regardless of political party, often shield their creations from rigorous review. They rationalize the analytical immunity as cost-saving, or defense against unprincipled attacks grounded in weak methodologies. There is a grain of truth here, but in the aggregate policymakers are rendered half-blind to the consequences of their choices.

The next president can delegate the responsibility for creating light that will shape a 21st century analytical infrastructure for advancing social equity. A good place to start would be a presidentially commissioned joint effort by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration.