Why data is a puzzle, not ‘the new oil’
Why data is a puzzle, not ‘the new oil’ It is an oft repeated phrase that ‘data is the new oil’. This seems logical, we’ve always known of capitalism and its endless striving for monopolies and the accumulation of wealth. So, the data collection of the tech giants, must be of the same order. Consider oil, always known as finite, and increasingly so. What happens when one person or group controls all of the oil available on our planet? That person or group has a lot of oil, which is very valuable. The difference between none, a little and a lot of oil is different only by number. It is also widely understood that wealth brings power and influence. But economists, and economic thinking more broadly, is clinically awful at predicting outcomes of human behavior beyond simple, closed loop, experiments (mostly of the thought variety). Whilst psychometricians can look at a person’s response to a test or quiz in a fundamentally different fashion than mere future prognosticat...