Looking ATUS

Sometimes, I can’t help but suspect that back when he was a young and impressionable child, science killed President George W. Bush’s dog. Whether or not, for example, it was in some freak chemistry lab explosion during show-and-tell day, I don’t know – but, whatever it was, it appears to have left a deep and lasting grudge.\nThe latest example of this anti-science sentiment is the administration’s decision to cut the funding for the American Time Use Survey – a survey that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has conducted since 2003 to gather data on how individual Americans spend their daily lives. Sounds boring, right? But this information is applicable to a wide range of topics investigated in the social sciences: As economic conditions change, do people spend more or less time shopping? Do rich people volunteer more than poor people? Are people sleeping more or less as time goes on? How much do college students study? And so on. \nSee, while social scientists have a fair amount of information about demographics, expenditures, opinions and so on, we don’t have a lot about individuals’ use of time. And time is an increasingly valuable resource (as you have almost certainly noticed in this week of pre-spring break midterms). By conducting an average of 13,300 phone interviews a year – and on a regular, annual basis – the ATUS helps to fill this gap. And with other countries conducting or planning to conduct their own time use surveys (approximately 50 other countries, to be exact), the value of this data set for social science is all the greater.\nBut, if you’re not a social scientist, what’s in it for you? Well, as we analyze this set of data, the government can use it to craft better policies to try to improve or maintain the quality of citizens’ lives, businesses can use it to provide new goods and services and poets can write sonnets about how much housework we do. (Okay, perhaps not that last one – but they could if they wanted to.)\nThere are plenty of ways in which the U.S. government wastes taxpayers’ money. And, indeed, some government-funded research projects can appear far from useful to the citizens paying for them (although these sometimes yield surprises – the classic example being the defense department’s ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet). But the ATUS is so broad in application and so directly relevant to Americans’ lives (we, after all, are the subject of its study) that it’s quite far from falling into this category. The current cost for the program is $4.4 million, and supporters are trying to raise its piece of the 2009 federal budget to $6 million – but as University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt noted in a Feb. 25 post on the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, that is a bargain for a survey of its size and scope.\nFormer BLS commissioner Katharine G. Abraham has started an online petition, which you can find at www.saveatus.org. Better hurry; this survey may be about time, but it’s running out of it.