Reposting: "A Book Full of Numbers"

What follows is the text of a post originally published here on January 12, 2010. I am reposting it now to provide some guidance for the Spring 2010 Glenn Fellows, who are currently reading Bardach and trying to define their research projects. Unfortunately, the Post is no longer making Samuelson's article available for free, so there is no link to it.

Robert J. Samuelson is an op-ed columnist who often has something provocative to say about current events. His column in yesterday’s [January 11, 2010] Post was about the Statistical Abstract of the United States, an annual publication of the Census Bureau. I found it especially stimulating given that we have had our noses buried in Eugene Bardach’s A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis this week.

Bardach says that in defining the problem (step one of The Eightfold Path) one should think in terms of deficit and excess and “quantify if possible.” He also suggests that one’s thesis should consist of hypothesized relationships between two or more variables. Bardach’s Appendix A, for example, is about sentencing laws and rates of cocaine consumption (and drug-related crime).

Samuelson’s piece, meanwhile, could be the source of a number of testable hypotheses. For example, he reports (again, based on the Statistical Abstract of the United States) that the U.S. seems to enjoy the world’s lowest food prices, but to suffer from the highest rates of obesity. Just a coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

Samuelson also finds evidence in the Statistical Abstract that over the past four decades student-teacher ratios have declined dramatically, but that (contrary to everything that we’ve been told by the teachers’ unions) there has been no discernable improvement in standardized test results.

Finally, Samuelson notes that crime rates have declined since the early 1990s, and he speculates that that might be due to “better policing techniques” and/or “tougher sentencing” patterns, from which we might infer that Samuelson has not read Bardach’s Appendix A.

Anyway, I thought this might be helpful to the Glenn Fellows as they ponder the logic of the Research Proposal Worksheet.