Indulge me, please, and consider the five statements below. Do you believe them to be true or false? And in each case, would you like to be sure rather than have to admit that your reply is an uninformed opinion instead of a conclusion you can document?
The natural environment in southwestern Pennsylvania is unhealthy. Air and water quality compare unfavorably with metro areas in the Mid-Atlantic region.
The tax bill of a resident of Allegheny County (total of federal, state and local) is relatively low by national standards for major U.S. counties. This is not the result of governmental efficiency at the state and local level, but the product of inferior municipal services.
The Pittsburgh Public Schools educate children from distressed families more effectively than any big-city school system in the country.
Health care in this region is the most cost-effective in the nation, because our hospitals and physicians dispense medical services of the highest quality to be found anywhere in the world.
Southwestern Pennsylvania leads the nation both in Ph.D.s per capita and in pre-schoolers as a percentage of total population.
Clearly the relevance of these particular topic sentences is arguable, and I would guess, though I don't know, that none is true. But there is no debating the fact that the general subject areas are of vital interest and have been at the center of public debate in this region for several decades. We care very much about these subjects, but, ironically, as I pointed out in a column last Sunday, for all our huffing and puffing our civic discussions about them remain uninformed. "Things happen!" -- but we are content to remain in the dark about how or why.
That is madness in this day and age. We have the means to find out what has been going on around here, yet do not employ them. The Post-Gazette's regional benchmarks published over the past six years are a stab at better information -- and I am proud of them -- but they are much too primitive. We need sophisticated measurements that are integral to our public life.
The last is important; the indexes I have in mind would be widely accepted and understood, not subjects for debate, and they would have fundamental utility.
Consider, by way of example, a statistic like the unemployment rate. When you hear that the rate this month is 6 percent, you react immediately. You make an instant calculation not just about what it indicates about local and national joblessness, but also how the recent update will affect a range of other aspects of your personal and business life. The index provides perspective and "you don't have to think about it."
Now, suppose we had a series of indexes of comparable power, measuring regional performance in health care, government service, economic vitality, social amenities and environmental quality that were similarly embraced and awaited. Suppose also that they were cumulative in the manner of unemployment rates (you could track an index over time) and widely accepted as measurements of the quality of our life compared to other places or global best practices. To me, the value would be incalculable.
You will notice the introduction of the word "quality" in the last paragraph. It is a key concept because social science and computer technologies now make it possible to do qualitative measuring like never before; it is not necessary to stick with quantitative measures like increases or drops in population. With time and imagination and the help of talent at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh and other regional institutions, we could measure nearly anything we choose and compare the results with whatever standards recommend themselves.
The goal, and I don't believe it is a fantasy, would be a series of "Pittsburgh indicators" that would help us keep book on ourselves and, more important, galvanize us to act on the information uncovered by our science. This would result not only in better government and better education and better everything else, but these results also would recommend our community to others because it was provably competitive. It would sell itself in fact and not in slogan.
I also suspect that if we got the science right, we would have something that could be exported. Keeping book on yourself could become a Pittsburgh specialty, in the manner of the metals business years ago: If you want to see how things are done in environmental monitoring, remedial education, insurance cost-containment, etc., look to Pittsburgh. As often as not, indexes could be adapted rather than developed from scratch, but in my experience the field is so wide open that that, too, would be marketable.
The tough part of this is the politics. Most public officials, who are in the business of making arguments, have a vested interest in misinformation. Academics, who have a vested interest in reputation, are leery of anything that is intelligible or widely popular. What you measure and what you don't is also an accurate barometer of what you care about. People don't like to be pinned down. All that said, this strikes me as important work that this community needs to embrace as it moves forward.
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