In our new Big Data world, making sense of the mass of statistics and information that surrounds us is, to borrow a phrase, like getting a drink of water from a fire hose.
“Lots of companies and organizations are drowning in data,” explained M. Marit “Miki” Rehavi OPC ’97, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia. “They know there’s something important they can learn from it, but they have so much they don’t know where to start.” What more and more organizations have done is turn to academics such as Rehavi to help them make sense of it all.
Diving into the reams of data, Rehavi often discovers surprising and unexpected truths: Upon closer inspection, decisions that are supposed to be objective often turn out to be quite subjective. As Rehavi tells her students, “‘There’s what people tell everyone that they do [in making a decision]. There’s how they think they do it in practice. And there’s what they actually do.’”
“Our brains are wonderfully designed to help us take shortcuts,” she elaborated. “But our narrative of what we’re doing may not be the real story.”
Giving an example from her own work, Rehavi pointed to a 2013 article she co-authored in the Yale Law Journal about racial disparities in federal prison sentences. Judges sentence defendants, so it is natural to scrutinize them as the source of disparities. However, under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, comparable defendants who commit the same crime ought to receive the same sentence. In practice, Rehavi found, a great deal turns on subjective decisions prosecutors make about what crimes to charge a defendant with in the first place. A federal statute, for example, requires that everyone convicted of using a gun while committing a crime of violence should receive an additional five-year sentence. Yet Black defendants are nearly twice as likely to be charged under that statute as similar white defendants arrested for the same crimes. Rehavi also has analyzed physicians’ treatment decisions, and hiring and promotion decisions in the federal civil service and in her own economics profession.
The work of economists has been transformed over the last generation thanks to the availability of these massive data sets, many of them from the federal government. Rehavi’s criminal justice data, for example, came from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, though she has also gotten information by other means, such as requests under the Freedom of Information Act and research agreements with private companies. Government agencies and companies, Rehavi said, are usually eager to share their data with researchers like her. “They realize the value of data research and don’t have the time in-house to do it themselves. So, it is increasingly common for researchers to get access to confidential databases, because the data providers benefit from the information, too.”
Not only does Rehavi use this data in her own research, she also serves as an advisor to Pro Publica, a nonprofit group that publishes investigative stories on a wide range of topics in the public interest. Rehavi helps journalists and their editors understand what data is available and how to use it in a clear and responsible manner. Though she is an economist by training, Rehavi said that much of her work now is done in collaboration with non-economists.
Rehavi’s career path almost took her to law school after she graduated from Harvard in 2001. She was offered a job with the Council of Economic Advisers, and while working on health and education policy at the White House, she came to appreciate how many policy questions were also questions of economics. Changing course, Rehavi got her master’s from the London School of Economics and her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan before joining the University of British Columbia faculty in 2010. Shortly thereafter she was named a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Like many OPCs, her greatest memory of Penn Charter is of a teacher, in her case the late science teacher Alice Davis, with whom she took chemistry and AP chemistry. “She was a force!” Rehavi gushed. The high standards Davis set for her students imparted one lesson but Rehavi particularly remembers another.
If anyone would say, “I can’t,” Rehavi recalled, Davis would reply, “No, you don’t know how to do it, but you can do it.”
“At the time we would roll our eyes at that,” Rehavi laughed, “but I think her point is really important. If we tell ourselves we can’t do something, then we’re never going to do it.”
– Mark F. Bernstein OPC '79