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The Open Source Policy Center, which was formally launched this week, celebrates an open source approach to making policy analysis transparent, accessible, and collaborative.
Wikipedia’s content and the Android phone software are examples of the open source philosophy. Open sourcing policy analysis means that the public is empowered to contribute its skills, expertise, and passion to make government better.
Open sourcing policy analysis means that the public is empowered to contribute its skills, expertise, and passion to make government better.
In time, transparent and accessible modeling will reduce bugs and gimmicks in the budgeting process, enable improvement of economic methods through peer review and peer contribution, and highlight the uncertainty of policy impacts.
One of OSPC’s early projects is TaxBrain, which enables policymakers, journalists, and the public, to study tax policy using open-source economic simulation models accessed through an open-source web application.
TaxBrain relies on several open source simulation models that work together to allow for “static” scoring and various types of dynamic scoring of individual income and payroll tax reforms. In static scoring, the overall size of the economy is held fixed. In dynamic scoring, policy changes can affect the size of the economy.
A core team of contributors oversees each simulation model. The core team members for models currently available on TaxBrain are T.J. Alumbaugh, Jason DeBacker, Richard Evans, Daniel Feenberg, Martin Holmer, John O’Hare, Amy Xu, and me.
Many other contributors have devoted their time and energy to these projects as well. The community is eager to collaborate with other modelers and data scientists on new projects, which could include using TaxBrain output to make cool data visualizations, leveraging TaxBrain static calculations to make stylized models more relevant to policy, or even creating entirely new “PolicyBrain” webapps for other policy areas such as welfare and transfer programs.
The Open Source Policy Center joins a growing field of economists working on essential open source tools for advancing economics and public policy. Other related projects include the Tom Sargent and John Stachurski led QuantEcon, the New York Fed’s newly open-sourced FRBNY-DSGE model, and many others. OSPC also leverages the work of countless software developers working on open source data science tools, such as the Continuum Analytics-led Anaconda analytics platform.
Please try out TaxBrain to learn more about tax policy, or check out the the code for the underlying models or webapp on GitHub. You can also read the Wall Street Journal‘s take on transparency in modeling and the Open Source Policy Center in their recent editorial.
The Open Source Policy Center, which was formally launched this week, celebrates an open source approach to making policy analysis transparent, accessible, and collaborative.
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