From the director: Listen well

Those of us who spend our days combing through data to understand the economy are often advised to get out from behind our desks and talk to "real people." The idea is that numbers can only tell so much of the story. To really understand how Americans experience the economy, we should ask them.

Not only is this common sense, it is the right relationship between scholar and subject. To assume that knowledge can only flow from scholars to the public is, frankly, arrogant and wrong. These are good instincts, and I don't disagree with them. But, what do we do with the stories people share with us? It turns out this is a hard question, as my own experience illustrates.

In 2006, I had a new Ph.D. and my first research job, and I wanted to return to an old question about the labor market: Why were employment rates for Black men so much lower than for White men?

I thought that talking to people facing this difficult labor market could suggest new places to look for an explanation. I organized a series of focus groups with Black men who were looking for work and asked them to discuss the barriers they faced. One factor came up over and over again: Job seekers said that drug testing was a barrier to employment. This seemed like the kind of idea such conversations were designed to identify-an explanation that economists had thus far overlooked.

I went to work tracking down data to test this hypothesis, hoping it might identify a new route for lifting employment rates. Instead, the data showed that employment rates for Black men rose when states passed statutes encouraging drug testing by employers. This was true in many different states and over a long period of time. Moreover, the opposite was also true: When states limited drug testing, employment rates for Black men fell.

This was not what the conversations suggested I would find. But after some reflection (and more analysis), it's clear what happened. The people I talked to had indeed experienced drug testing as a barrier. But people who had found work were not in my conversations. Even if they had been, it's unlikely they would have known which hiring practices affected their employment.

This experience convinced me that talking to real people can be an important starting point for understanding the economy, but it cannot be our ending point. This is not because people are wrong about their experiences. It's because their experiences are necessarily only a part of the picture. To get the whole picture, you need … well, data.

The Institute strives to be a place where our work responds to what we hear when we engage beyond the research community. Sometimes that means looking harder and finding support for the experiences we hear about in the data. Other times, it means coming back with insights that shed new light on those experiences without discounting them. Either way, the result of listening well is a conversation, not a lecture.

This article is featured in the Fall 2024 issue of For All, the magazine of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute