The 2011 film Moneyball, based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, chronicles the rise of sports analytics to detect hidden patterns in Major League Baseball. For the Oakland Athletics, this embrace of data took a team with a shortage of star power to victory in the American League West in 2002.
John Hart, the CEO of Open the Books, a right-leaning watchdog that tracks federal and state spending, and Citizen Portal AI founder Paul Allen, who co-founded data giant Ancestry.com, are now building what they hope will be a sort of nonpartisan Moneyball for politics.
They are melding a massive database of government funding assembled by Open the Books with Citizen Portal AI’s database of over one million hours of interviews, speeches, and other comments by public officials, Hart and Allen told me. They said the move will better inform the public about the most consequential public policy decisions and debates—and make it possible for users to easily compare what politicians spend with what they say. The partnership has not been previously reported.
