| 摘要 | Mister Chairman, Madame Vice Chair, Members of the Committee, distinguished co-panelists, and guests:
America’s statistical agencies are the eyes and ears of our democracy. When they are functioning properly, they provide essential information to help the public and its elected representatives see what is going right in our country—and what is going wrong. Such information is crucial for forming a more perfect union. Without timely and accurate information on our domestic problems, our government cannot hope to address these problems swiftly, much less effectively. Whether you are a progressive or a conservative, in favor of more government or less, you need good data to inform your own efforts to make our country better.
The US was the first government in the modern era to recognize the importance of evidence-based public policy. Our Constitution mandated a decennial census—a truly revolutionary notion back in the late 18th century. Providing policymakers with accurate empirical information was essential, in the words of James Madison, “in order that they might rest their arguments on facts, rather than assertion and conjecture.” And for most of our history, the US statistical system has been well ahead of the curve, if not a virtual wonder of the world.
Unfortunately, our government statistical services seem to have been falling away from the global forefront for at least a generation. And in key areas, our federal information systems have not kept up with the social and economic changes in our country that they should be helping us monitor. Sad to say, our statistical services are currently incapable of providing even the most basic facts and figures we need for confronting some of our new and pressing domestic social troubles.
In my book Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, I tried to highlight our country’s curious inattention to the collapse of work for grown men over the postwar era. Although their employment situation has been slowly improving since 2016, when my study was published, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report (for April 2019) indicates that “work rates” (more technically, employment-to-population ratios) for working-age US men are nonetheless on par with the levels for 1939, as reported in the 1940 Census. In other words, today’s employment situation for our country’s civilian, noninstitutional, non-retirement-age men is still a Depression-scale problem.
Our failure to cope more expeditiously with this problem, I submit, is in part due to our failure to understand it—a failure, in turn, directly related to the inadequacy of our statistical services to illuminate this problem’s important dimensions. I pointed then to a number of shortcomings and gaps in official statistical coverage that limit the information policymakers and concerned citizens should want to have about America’s still-ongoing “Men Without Work” crisis.
Read the full testimony here.
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