Photo:  A commemorative plaque for Adam Smith, called "the father of economics,"  is located in Smith's home town of Kirkcaldy. 



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As part of his plan for socialism in the early 1970s, Salvador Allende [overthrown by Pinochet, whop was sponsored by Kissinger} created Project Cybersyn. The Chilean president’s idea was to offer bureaucrats unprecedented insight into the country’s economy. Managers would feed information from factories and fields into a central database. In an operations room bureaucrats could see if production was rising in the metals sector but falling on farms, or what was happening to wages in mining. They would quickly be able to analyse the impact of a tweak to regulations or production quotas. Cybersyn never got off the ground. But something curiously similar has emerged in Salina, a small city in Kansas. Salina311, a local paper, has started publishing a “community dashboard” for the area, with rapid-fire data on local retail prices, the number of job vacancies and more—in effect, an electrocardiogram of the economy. —The Economist

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1/2: Data Science Is the Third Wave of Economics since 1776.  Callum Williams @TheEconomist