Some societies are more healthy, productive, innovative, and stronger than others. We now understand many factors that contribute to this difference, and we collect and track many stats related to these factors. To predict future changes in social health, it is especially important to track well the stats that change the fastest. After all, for slowly changing factors infrequent noisy measures may do fine.
Only loosely related: I wonder what the population pyramid looks like filtered for high-status people (or filtered for many other relevant dimensions like income or education). The ability to predict the the share of the population with certain attrubutes seems valuable.
Are you thinking more about categorical, indexical or continous data? But anyway I agree that it would help. And with more data we could move beyond simplistics hypothetical models like Scott Alexander's Zebra stripes:https://slatestarcodex.com/...
Only loosely related: I wonder what the population pyramid looks like filtered for high-status people (or filtered for many other relevant dimensions like income or education). The ability to predict the the share of the population with certain attrubutes seems valuable.
Are you thinking more about categorical, indexical or continous data? But anyway I agree that it would help. And with more data we could move beyond simplistics hypothetical models like Scott Alexander's Zebra stripes:https://slatestarcodex.com/...