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I recently re-read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, and I was struck at just how many coordination failures he resolved in his lifetime in order to provide public goods. Off the top of my head, he founded a public library, he founded a university,  he created a public service in charge of extinguishing fires, organized street cleaning and garbage collection, etc. all in his native Philadelphia.

Reading about Franklin’s life and public service reminded me that he had been my initial inspiration for my “Contributing to Public Goods” series of posts. And since some of you might have missed most of those posts, I thought I would put them all in one place for now:

1. The Opportunity Cost of “Gangnam Style.”
2. Deciphering Key Provisions of the Agricultural Act of 2014.
3. “Do What You Love” Is Overrated.
4. How to Stock the Perfect Bourbon Bar.
5. The Complete Guide to Accents of the British Isles.

I am always skeptical of people who bandy big data about. As I have discussed earlier on this blog, big data is great if you’re in the business of forecasting, but it is not so great if your goal is to do social science. I raised two points. First:

[W]ithout the identification of causal relationships, there can be no science, social or otherwise. This means that no matter how large a dataset, if it does not allow answering questions of the form “Does X cause Y?,” that dataset is worthless to scientists.

Second: