Last Wednesday I spoke at at a World Bank conference on price statistics. While this is not usually thought of as a scintillating subject, I got a great deal of satisfaction out of preparing and presenting my remarks. In part, this was because my late father, Robert Summers, focused his economic research onInternational price comparisons. It was also because I am convinced that data is the ultimate public good and we will soon have much more data than we do today.
I made four primary observations.
• First, scientific progress is driven more by new tools and new observations than by hypothesis construction and testing. I cited a number of examples: the observation that Jupiter was orbited by several moons clinched the case against the Ptolemaic system — the belief that all celestial objects circle around the Earth. We learnt of cells by seeing them when the microscope was constructed. Accelerators made the basic structure of atoms obvious.