One of the small but satisfying administrative tasks I've had as pipeline editor at Oil & Gas Journal is providing the US Department of Commerce with data for its annual 'Statistical Abstract of the United States.' It felt good be part of an organization trusted enough to provide this information and also to know that at least one small piece of OGJ's annual Pipeline Economics report would be available to the larger world.
The final satisfaction each year would come when a copy of the finished book arrived in the mail. Aside from information on the characteristics of petroleum pipelines, each new edition contained data regarding national health expenditures, criminal victimizations and victimization rates, employer costs per hour worked for state and local governments, and on and on, with categories added and deleted each year to stay current.
The Commerce Department, however, has already published the Abstract's 2012 edition. A green, bookmark-shaped note accompanied it. The note read: "Due to the proposed elimination of the Statistical Abstract program from the President's FY 2012 budget, we worked on an expedited production schedule to bring you the 2012 edition 3 months ahead of schedule. There are currently no plans to continue the program, either in print or on-line. Thank you for your support in the production of the Statistical Abstract through the years. Your assistance has been most valuable to us. The Statistical Abstract Staff."
Some bad news
As someone who has worked gathering, analyzing, and publishing information for my entire professional life—and enjoys these acts on a leisure basis as well—I took the Abstract's cancellation as very bad news; the more so when I noted that this was its 131st edition. The industrial revolution hadn't even occurred the first time the Statistical Abstract was published, and now, it would not be published any more.
To be sure, OGJ will continue publishing the data both its readers and the industry at large find so valuable. Presumably the other organizations that submitted data to the Abstract will continue to do so as well. But what gave the Abstract its unique value was its compiling of a vast array of data in one place.
The 2012 edition features more than 1,400 tables and graphs covering nearly every educational, judicial, meteorological, governmental, business, cultural, agriculatural, and medical characteristic of the US. And just in case the reader can't find what he or she is looking for in its pages, the Abstract also features a guide to other statistical information both in print and on the internet.
On a positive note, Adobe Acrobat versions of all 131 editions can be found at www.census.gov/compendia/statab/, as well as spreadsheet files for each table. But from this point forward the document will remain static, purely historical.
Cuts necessary
Cuts to the US government's budget are necessary. Much has been made from both ends of the political spectrum regarding the need to prioritize these cuts. Conversations attempting to reach agreement on these priorities have repeatedly broken down into rancor and gridlock.
Evidently, however, both the left and the right agreed that the Abstract program was ripe for the cutting. The cut might have been expedient. It might have been easy. That either or both of these were the case is telling.
The government of a free country that would readily reduce its people's access to information leaves itself susceptible to doubt regarding how much information it really wants the people to have. That most of the population seems more interested in sound bites and muck-raking than actual information might have helped cutting the Abstract go unnoticed. But it also increases the importance of making information readily available to those who would seek it out.
Apparently this job now lies entirely in the private sector.
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