The Fifth Risk(42)
About a year after they started selling insurance to farmers, the people at the Climate Corporation noticed something funny was going on. The farmers buying their weather insurance were spending a lot of time playing with the software to which the insurance gave them access. “We found the farmers logging in just to see the data on their fields,” said Friedberg. To insure American farmland, he’d needed to understand the fields better than the farmers did themselves: now they knew it. “We thought we were in the insurance business, but we were actually in the knowledge business,” said Friedberg. “It went from being insurance to being recommendations for farmers.” That first year, in 2011, the Climate Corporation generated $60 million in sales, just from selling weather insurance to farmers. Three years later they were insuring 150 million acres of American farmland—the bulk of the Corn Belt—and teaching the farmers how to farm them more efficiently. Six years after venture capitalists valued David Friedberg’s new company at $6 million, Monsanto bought it for $1.1 billion.
And yet through the entire experience, David Friedberg had this growing sense of unease. “When you come from San Francisco and grew up in Silicon Valley, every measure is about progress,” he said. “The progress in society. The progress in the economy. The progress of technology. And you kind of get used to that. And you think that’s the norm in the way the world operates, because you see everything getting better. Then you get on a plane and if you land anywhere but a big city, it feels the same. It’s total stagnation. It’s ‘we’ve been farming the same six fields for the last seventy years.’ It’s getting married at nineteen or twenty. It’s the opposite of progression. Life is about keeping up. Life is about keeping everything the same.”
People in the places he’d traveled lived from paycheck to paycheck. They were exposed to risks in ways that he was not: the weather was just one of those risks. He began to notice other kinds of data—for instance, that 40 percent of Americans can’t cover an unexpected expense of a thousand bucks. The farmers usually weren’t so bad off, but their situation was inherently precarious and threatened by modernity. Farmers didn’t work on desktop computers, and so they’d largely skipped the initial internet revolution. But they had mobile phones, and in 2008, when the 3G networks went up in rural America, farmers finally got online. “The problem with the internet is that it shows everyone on earth what they’re missing,” said Friedberg. “And if you can’t get to it, you feel you are getting fucked. That there is this very visceral and obvious shift that is happening in the world that you’re missing out on.”
At the same time David Friedberg was helping farmers to secure their immediate economic future, he was threatening their identity. Your family has been tilling this same soil for a century, and yet this data-crunching machine I’ve built in just a few years can do it better. The phrase was a whisper underlying every conversation he’d had with a farmer.
Friedberg played in a high-stakes poker game with some friends in the tech world. In their last game before the 2016 presidential election, he offered to bet anyone who would take the other side that Donald Trump would win.
After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data. The USDA removed the inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse by the government. The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, statistics that detailed access to drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico were deleted from the FEMA website. In a piece for FiveThirtyEight, Clare Malone and Jeff Asher pointed out that the first annual crime report released by the FBI under Trump was missing nearly three-quarters of the data tables from the previous year. “Among the data missing from the 2016 report is information on arrests, the circumstances of homicides (such as the relationships between victims and perpetrators), and the only national estimate of annual gang murders,” they wrote. Trump said he wanted to focus on violent crime, and yet was removing the most powerful tool for understanding it.
And as for the country’s first chief data scientist—well, the Trump administration did not show the slightest interest in him. “I basically knew that these guys weren’t going to listen to us,” said DJ, “so we created these exit memos. The memos showed that this stuff pays for itself a thousand times over.” He hoped the memos might give the incoming administration a sense of just how much was left to be discovered in the information the government had collected. There were questions crying out for answers: for instance, what was causing the boom in traffic fatalities? The Department of Transportation had giant pools of data waiting to be searched. One hundred Americans were dying every day in car crashes. The thirty-year trend of declining traffic deaths has reversed itself dramatically. “We don’t really know what’s going on,” said DJ. “Distracted driving? Heavier cars? Faster driving? More driving? Bike lanes?”
The knowledge to be discovered in government data might shift the odds in much of American life. You could study the vaccination data, for instance, and create heat maps for disease. “If you could randomly drop someone with measles somewhere in the United States, where would you have the biggest risk of an epidemic?” said DJ. “Where are epidemics waiting to happen? These questions, when you have access to data, you can do things. Everyone is focused on how data is a weapon. Actually, if we don’t have data, we’re screwed.”