January 1, 2016
Read Berkeley Social Welfare Assistant Professor Tina K. Sacks' MSNBC article, "How Big Data failed Baltimore," in which she reflects on her time as a federal public health employee in Baltimore and the lessons to be learned from the city's data collection efforts affecting the community's most impoverished individuals and families.
"Unwittingly, we slipped down the rabbit hole of measuring complicated social problems with simplistic counts: violent crimes down; arrests up; new lead poisonings up," she writes. "But what was the story behind the numbers? Was the city really improving the conditions for people living in Baltimore or were we just getting better at measuring misery?"