Documentation and the Nobel Prize
Dear Fellow,
On Friday, 6th October 2023, I was a guest at one of the regular meetings of the Public Integrity Club (PIC) at the University of Jos. PIC is a brainchild of YIAGA Africa “that seeks to inculcate the attributes of honesty, transparency, and wholesomeness into public affairs.” The meeting was themed “The Nigerian Story”.
In the invitation's content, I was asked to discuss the inspiration behind my book and my other interests. At the event, I resolved to speak on the practice of documentation—the art of it, its importance, and the need for it to become a social habit, especially in Nigeria where even our public institutions do not take it seriously. As a build-up for my argument on the need to take documentation seriously as individuals, I shared stories of my visit to the state secretariat of the Federal Ministry of Education to obtain data for the schools in my city. (The despatch “My Grandfather’s Notebook” was the primary content of my session at the event.) At the state secretariat of the Federal Ministry of Education, the most recent available data for the schools in Jos North Local Government Area of Plateau State, Nigeria was that of the 2020/2021 session as of the day of my visit on Monday, 25th September 2023. (Meanwhile, schools are currently in the 2023/2024 academic session.) After the event, half a dozen folks came to me to say that from that moment forward they would take documentation seriously.
On Tuesday, 10th October 2023, the newsletter from FlowingData was an announcement of the amazing work of Harvard economist Claudia Goldin which earned her the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 (commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics). The newsletter from FlowingData reads in part from the beginning:
“Nobel Prize for research in global markets using historical data
Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A big part of her studies are rooted in the collection and analysis of centuries old data.”
Here’s an excerpt from the announcement of the prize by The Royal Swedish Academy (the organisation charged with the responsibility of selecting the winner):
Before Goldin’s pathbreaking book was published in 1990, researches had mainly studied data from the twentieth century and concluded that there was a clear positive association between economic growth and the number of women in paid employment. In other words, as the economy grew, more women were in work. However, because older data had barely been studied, this relationship remained unclear over a long period of time.
Goldin’s work is simply a revision of the theories about women in the labour market before 1990 when her book was published. It implies, therefore, that the theory which preceded her book—the theory that women in paid employment grew as the economies of nations grew—was based on data from around 1900 to 1990. Goldin’s work was basically a closer examination of the historical records of women in the labour market from the close of the 1700s to the 1900s—a deep dive into public (and private) archives accumulated over a 200-year period!
In the process she uncovered some hidden details: (1) The columns in census and public records for job roles designated women more often as “wife”; it didn’t matter if a wife worked on farm fields alongside her husband (2) There were more women in the U.S. labour force at the end of the 1890s than the official statistics showed; for example, there were about three times more married women working than the census register showed (3) The rise of industrialisation in the nineteenth century caused a major decline in the population of women in the U.S. labour force (4) The women labour force started growing again after the 1940s to date. The points culminate to disprove the long-held notion that women's representation in the U.S. labour force grew as the economy grew. She further showed the influences of the changes in the women labour force to include: Marriage, Social Expectations of Women, The Pill, Gender Earning Gaps, Parenthood, and Legislation, among others.
Long and short, the winner of The Nobel Prize for Economics 2023 would not have been able to launch the research work which earned her the prize had the U.S. public institutions not diligently documented their efforts over the centuries. Who knows what a deep dive into the records kept by the Federal Ministry of Education in Nigeria, starting from 1960 to date, will uncover? The concern should be about what we stand to lose by not attempting such a far-reaching review of our history, and not even to begin contemplating the possibility of winning the highest prize for scholarship in the country. Yet, we must ask the question: How well have our public institutions documented their efforts over the decades? Or even, what is our appreciation for biographies, what is the volume that has been published so far? With my experience at the state secretariat for the Federal Ministry of Education, I fear if at all we have reliable historical records at our public institutions.
Really, the change begins with one person, then one family, then one community centre, the one state government, and then one national government. That is how the revolution must begin—one individual at a time. Keep a journal, date your notes, date your pictures, accurately record any piece of information—and be diligent in doing these things. Documentation must become a social habit—even, a national habit—before we can have the assurance of learning better from our past in the future. And it begins with you, good Fellow.
Did you inscribe the date of purchase on the last book you acquired, or on the last note you took in church or at a conference or seminar? Good Fellow, you could be preparing the next Nobel Prize winner in your family by simply being a diligent record keeper for the rest of your lifetime. Therefore, document more diligently.
Your LetterMan,
Tongjal, W. N.
Further Reading:
To fully understand Claudia Goldin’s work, check out this resource: Check this out!
The last two paragraphs are weighty