Tech Enabled

One of the central questions facing policymakers and community leaders is how to best understand and improve economic mobility.  Opportunity Insights was founded by economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Nathaniel Hendren.  Their team of economists from Harvard and Brown University are working together to analyze new data and create new platforms to help community leaders make more informed decisions. The institute’s research on economic mobility harnesses the power of big data to document both the decline of the American Dream in some neighborhoods and potential solutions to revive it. They also are providing real time insights into the economic recovery coming out of COVID.

The changing nature of work is providing both the fastest job growth and income gains to those with higher levels of skills and education. It’s vital then for governors, mayors, and education leaders to have better, real time data about their labor markets, including the skills most in demand. This has become even more important as leaders work to help workers who became unemployed during COVID-19 find a path back to employment. EMSI provides data and tools for government agencies and education institutions to ensure their training programs match the labor demands in their regions. 

Small businesses are the lifeblood of the American economy. COVID-19 has been devastating for many small businesses who weathered through state closures, faced the uneasy task of reopening, only to face additional closures in some states. We’re exploring the insights we can glean from platforms like Thumbtack, an online marketplace that helps local professionals and customers find each other.  But Thumbtack also has something else to offer state and local leaders. Their platform provides a real-time view into small business activity across the country which can be helpful in shaping policies and informing decisions. 

Government websites were quickly overwhelmed during COVID and agencies have struggled to meet the surging demand for services. The US Digital Response is a nonpartisan group with more than 5,000 volunteers that are supporting state and local government during the COVID-19 crisis. They increase the capacity of government teams to rapidly update web services and also develop open-source tools that can help scale to other government agencies. We are joined in this episode by US Digital Responses’ CEO, Raylene Yung.

In March, Governors enacted a sweeping set of actions to increase social distancing to help slow the spread of COVID-19.  The open question was whether people would heed these measures. 

The answer came from SafeGraph which has a dataset of foot traffic for 5 million businesses and organizations including 5,500 retail chains and 3 million small businesses. 

Safegraph is providing free access of some of their datasets to help researchers, non-profits, and governments respond to COVID-19 and support their economic recoveries.  So far, more than 1,000 organizations including the CDC are already in the Safegraph data consortium.  

We are joined this week by Ryan Fox Squire, a Senior Data Strategist at Safegraph who discusses how Safegraph is helping leaders with navigating the difficult decisions they face with enacting and now relaxing social distancing measures.