The Data We Keep

24 May, 2025

I am sitting on the bus and a man is exclaiming that he needs to quit his job that only pays him $15/hr and will only give him part time hours. He hates this job (presumably the work itself as it's a job at the courthouse), and after taxes it comes out to close to a mere to $8/hr. This is, of course, an unlivable wage in Minneapolis in 2025. He goes on about how he's lived in many places before, and that the smallness of this city makes it a suffocating ¹ circle ² he is loud, and upset.

What really gets me though, is that as this man gets off the bus, he disdainfully says "minnihopeless."

I am more and more often choosing not to wear my headphones in public, and I am more and more often treating "crazy" people as Truth Tellers that exist somewhere underneath the Prophet umbrella ³. One of the main distinguishers of this type of "Truth Teller" from someone I might think of as a "Prophet" is that he was speaking his truth (much of which I did agree with and feel for) but not necessarily the truth (there were many things he said that simply were not facts.) But the power of this type of Truth Telling is that it lets me into a real slice of the state of affairs in my city and in my country.

In the 2024 US election, I was regularly hearing data-informed messaging that inflation was down and so was unemployment. As someone who so desperately wanted to believe these things and who also understands that large scale study of data produces more accurate results (in theory) than what I see in my own world, I believed it.

Even through my belief though, I felt confused: why did my reality feel so separate from these "data points?" In my corner of the world, it seemed more and more common for people to struggle to get jobs and to make enough to afford rising costs of food and rent.

A few months after the election, I read this article titled Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. with my department (tech and analytics teams) in a study group. The author seemed to have a very similar experience to me that instigated his research:

These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different. Cities that appeared increasingly seedy. Regions that seemed derelict. Driving into the office each day in Washington, I noted a homeless encampment fixed outside the Federal Reserve itself.

He then goes on to say something that really intrigued me:

I began to detect a second pattern inside and outside D.C. alike. Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes.

I see this pointing to the faith-based approach to data that many atheists and center towards left people hold in the US. The same frame of reference that says "In this house we believe that science is real" on yard signs, as if the concept of science represents truth itself. Science, however, is about constantly trying to investigate and unveil questions and answers. Often the methodology or the data itself isn't actually representative of what's true, and part of engaging in a "trusting" relationship with science is asking where the conclusions and data came from. ⁴

The article goes over examples of how the inflation and unemployment data cited so often wasn't the right data to be collecting. The intentions of all the individuals involved were not the problem, but the assumptions in the data collection were misleading at best, and fully invalidated the point of the data at worst. Here's an example from the article (I would recommend reading the whole thing, it's excellent):

Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as “employed.”

So it's important and useful to question where data and analysis is coming from, and also to actually listen to people around us and trust and take seriously what we can see. But the problem is, there's a lot we can't see with our eyes. This isn't an "either or" pitting data against line of sight, it has to be a "both and."

The issue with the unemployment data isn't that someone is trying to measure and report on unemployment, it's that they're doing it wrong. There are actually a lot of things we can't see that are true. I'm not going to go into the many pitfalls of trying to convince someone of something using "facts" about things they can't see with their eyes, but I will say that collecting data on our world can do many things other than convince individuals of things. It can help a campaign or group determine if they're doing what they hope to be doing. It can track change over time and change at a large scale. It can help bodies of people prioritize their time, effort, and money.

I think we often hear Truth Tellers speak and feel so refreshed by their candor in a culture that is full of misleading statements and passive aggression that we think they're telling The Truth and not Their Truth. This happens in politics all the time as various political leaders "Say The Quiet Part Out Loud" which has nothing to do with whether or not those things are representative of the world we want to see, but instead has to do with how ashamed we are about the parts of us that have grown up in a society that enculturates us to think that way. Just like data, it's worth being careful and cautious about the motivations of the Truth Tellers we listen to.

So I want to return to what was so cutting about what was said on bus ride, and put it in the context of this moment and of what is true: It's 2025, and a man on the bus is making $8/hr which is, of course, not a livable wage. The bus stops, and a woman has a full cart of her objects and is getting on the bus very slowly, clearly also living in poverty. He gets off the bus, frustrated because it's going so slowly, and with this woman getting on at the speed she's going, he's ready to give up and walk. That's when he says "minnihopeless."

Just a few days ago, the Star Tribute released a headline claiming homelessness is down in the Twin Cities. My eyes see that's not true. We all see that's not true. What I've heard (though crucially haven't validated) is that the city simply stopped counting homelessness as a stat, and that's why it stopped going up. What I know, is that our mayor is running for reelection and that he's spend a tremendous amount of my tax dollars evicting homeless encampments so I'd stop seeing the problem with my eyes.

I love Minneapolis. I plan and hope to live here for a long time. Part of how I know I love it here is that my eyes and ears are learning how to tune into this place and how to be accountable to it. I have lived here long enough to have seen multiple election cycles and the way the news fluffs or agitates us. Summers where the car jacking stats spiked precisely and proportionally to how many stories I was hearing about real experiences of car jackings. I've been here long enough for thorough reports made of tons of interviews and high quality qualitative data mixed with quantitative stats to be written about the future of my neighborhood and for those reports to be fully "forgotten about." I've also seen countless improvements to public infrastructure that was clearly influenced by an abundance of urban planning data and best practices that materially make getting around better every year.

There's a balance here, one that I personally often fail at. A faith-based approach to data will leave us uninformed and uncurious and will at times even make us distrust our own eyes to the point of turning them away from what needs our attention. But data also helps us zoom out and remember there is so much more going on than we'll ever know that we need to acknowledge in our world view. I think this is a type of Two Pockets ⁵ moment. To hit this balance and remember the Two Pockets is part of how we build trust in our world lens. Zooming in and out of ourselves and honing the ways we take in the world.