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Data Deep-Divers Jacob Hacker and Jonathan Cohen at WNHH FM.
The economy’s roaring, according to official measures like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the GDP (Gross Domestic Product).
The economy’s ailing, and we’re all hurting, according to the human beings who live in it.
Maybe it’s time for a new way to measure the economy?
Two New Haveners, Jacob S. Hacker and Jonathan D. Cohen, are at the forefront of just that.
They’ve been developing a new tool to measure how the economy — and Americans — are doing. They call it the CORE Score. They’re developing it through a project called the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy launched by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where Cohen is employed. (Hacker is a Yale political scientist and president- and Congress-whisperer on issues like health care.)
They’re looking to get to the bottom of why Americans consistently say the economy is in bad shape while employment is high, unemployment is low, and corporate profits are up.
The CORE project follows in a line of similar quests to better measure economies and citizens’ quality of life. Others have included the World Happiness Report, the OECD Better life Index, Human Development Index, and Genuine Progress Indicator.
Their “CORE score” looks at not just employment numbers and corporate returns, but measures of economic security, people’s health and access to health care, rental or mortgage costs — even whether they’re voting and whether their elected officials pass laws that reflect their views.
“GDP and jobs are really important. But for a lot of people, their finances are precarious, health is not improving, housing has become a huge issue,” Hacker said in an appearance with Cohen Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. (Click here to read an article they wrote for the Wall Street Journal more fully describing the project.)
Rather than present one result to describe the country’s economy and well-being, the CORE Score breaks numbers down by category (economic security, economic opportunity, health, “political voice”). The score also breaks results down by county as well as by race and income in an effort to present a more nuanced view.
“Where you live determines the kind of economy you’re experiencing,” Hacker said.
Cohen and Harris described their group as representing a broad ideological spectrum of experts who agree on the need to rethink economics metrics in order to craft new policies.
Three years in, Cohen’s and Hacker’s team has honed the CORE Score and crunched 15 years of data through 2021. “What stood out to me was the lack of improvement in well-being in the United States, almost no improvement in 15 years of data,” Cohen said. He said his team found a surprisingly consistent trajectory of people struggling without much improvement overall. While more people have obtained health insurance since the passage of Obamacare, for instance, more people have also edged closer to being a paycheck away from homelessness or general financial hardship. When overall wealth has risen, so has income inequality, leaving many in the middle class behind.
The hope is eventually to bring CORE Score into real-time and have it show up in articles we read that shape the public’s understanding of how we’re doing as a nation — and how we can do better.
Click on the above video to watch the full discussion with Jacob Hacker and Jonathan Cohen about the “CORE Score,” including the challenge of accurately defining and measuring the state of the economy and the state of democracy. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.