Discussions of whether or not one type of impact analysis - economic, social, or environmental - deserve precedence over the other are ill-founded and miss the fact that all three are necessary to inform good decision making and each other.

That said, economic analysis carries obvious advantages, being a robust way to weigh the impacts between different physical, financial, and subjective intangible effects for individual people, and then weight the balance of those effects between people. That dollars are only a convenient, but arbitrary, yardstick of relative preferences and therefore well-being is aside to the actual aims of economic analysis. Albeit one often poorly explained by economists, and therefore, commonly misunderstood by non-economists through no fault of their own.

Sparowly Group’s Senior Economist, Sam Miller provides a explainer to help demystify misperceptions.

Social science delves into the complex and intricate realm of human behaviour, society, and culture. But it can be overlooked by many or avoided as being something that is hard to understand, boring or something left to the experts. Yet, without realising it, we are using it, or discussing it in some shape or form in our everyday lives.

The formalisation of data and algorithms has recently been the purview of computer science. And of course, the application of data and algorithms, in particular from the tech sector, has become essential to how we solve problems in our daily lives. We use data and algorithms to help us decide what movie to watch, or how to get directions in an unfamiliar city. But are there limits to the problems we can solve and decisions we can make by simply throwing an algorithm at a bunch of data? Sparrowly Group’s Ben Lever explores this.