Dashboard

A shiny server has been set up to provide an interface to data and statistics assembeled for this project. We should be able to scale to the quality of Our World in Data.

Indices

• Alternative laborforce capacity measures.
• Harvard indicator of sustainability.
• Human development index
• Inclusivity Index
• Urban Crisis Index
• Easterlin on index of welfare services.
• Progress out of Poverty Index job description.

Some considertions in constructing an index:

• The index number problem in constructing price indecies. See review starting with Fisher and Keynes.
• Keynes on homogeneity.
  This does not mean homogeneity in the timeseries sense, but in the sense of homogeneity of meaning. Keynes addressed this by prescribing short time intervals. The intervals in temporal and spatial context should be such that the meaning of a measurement does not change much. Including the context, as in the JMU public history example, can help both to organize and to condition such an index.
  
• Kuznets on construction of national income accounts. How to parse what in dynamic interconnected institutions is salient? At some point we are constrained by what has already been measured. Defining concepts of for measurement of growth. Note the need for a good concept of resources.
• Valuation
• Easterlin on happiness

.

GIS approaches

• Spatial History in the Public Square
• population cartograms, also consider maps based on other distance metrics, such as effective accesibility by transportation routes.
• Spatial issues in inequality
• Data Driven inclusive neighborhoods
• Projections
• spatial R R geo refcard

Data handling

See a nice overview on reproducible science. I differ with a couple of items. I prefer bzr to git for version control. My reasons may be outdated. Also I use Sweave and LaTeX rather than knitr for literate programing (combining code with text). How should data be handled and analyzed? One issue will be maintaining interfaces to third party data sources. See the St. Louis Fed's FRED initiative. A repository will be needed of our own processing of such data. R code for reproducible work through Sweave could address this. Here are some differences from a knitr perspective. For code development consider bzr . For communication, a system other than e-mail, forums or a wiki may be useful. For GIS work, Qgis may be preferable to Arcview for sharing and reproducible science due to its free software license. R libraries for geo data. Using USGS maps with R and leflet for interactive web maps. Some potential leads on analyzing the American Communities Survey with R: code, ACS package,resources for analysing similar large data sets, lightweight R package for 5 year file. Article on ACS . R tutorials. Tutorials on shiny.

Factors

Some basline factors beyond time and space could include:

• Sovereignity. Stephanie Kelton on: the basics .
• Social stability. Darrick Hammilton on stratification economics
  Note the potential pitfall in local control, as described by Pavilna Tcherneva in the presence of stratification.
• Participation
ILO report
• Death and Life of Great American Cities
• The Big Question for the U.S. Economy: How Much Room Is There to Grow?
• Water
  
• air, taking cocktail effects into account.
  
• housing relative to income
  
• HUD's new mandated housing segregation data- all communities are now required to do forms like this from Harrisonburg
• comprehensive employment measures, including OLF dynamics, available industries
• differences between governing group and the governed
  
• time spent in transactions, such as commuting
• Proportion of income spent of housing, food, transport, quality of life. See Pew Trust
• Incarceration Trends by Vera.
• energy spent in transactions such as climate control and transportation
• land: soil, buildable surface, food
• darkness, quiet, physical safety, sunlight, access to greenspaces
• economic access, through trade, for needs not locally available http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2016/03/household-expenditures-and-income">
• climate, baseline habitability
• community effects, access to culture and care
• outcomes: longevity by class - see Effects on men Source study.
  Brookings study on longevity.
• age based on life expectancy, consider in conjunction with effect of not shrinking on growth.
• Global historical life expectancy
• outcomes: mobility by class
• outcomes: incarceration rate, taking into account recent New York Times article and a broad understanding of being under court suprvision
• outcomes: incarceration rate, taking into account recent New York Times article and a broad understanding of being under court suprvision. Also, police contacts .

Tools

• GNU Emacs
• R
• Example of certifying
• Blogs
  • Devtools for Packages
  • open viz
  • Grammar of Graphics animation
• Superset
• World Bank Opendata
• FRED