## The Pulse of the Planet

## Source details

**Canonical URL:** [The Pulse of the Planet](https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/12/the-pulse-of-the-planet-cukier)

## Other formats

- [Markdown version](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/12/the-pulse-of-the-planet-cukier/index.md)
- [Structured JSON version](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/12/the-pulse-of-the-planet-cukier/index.json)
- [Bundle manifest](/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/12/the-pulse-of-the-planet-cukier/bundle-manifest.json)

## Bibliographic details
- Authors: KENNETH CUKIER
- Published: November 17, 2025

---

### The explosion of data and its implications
- The variety, frequency, and granularity of data sources have increased dramatically, creating a “big data” universe that requires a new mindset compared with the traditional “small data” world.
- Benefits of new data sources:
  - Greater accuracy and a closer reflection of “ground truth.”
  - Faster reporting, potentially in quasi real time.
  - Much higher granularity, down to small segments or individuals.
- Cautionary parallels:
  - Professionals can become accustomed to compressed or imperfect information (the MRI “classic” vs. updated scans), resisting better data because skills and practices are tuned to older signals.

### Key alternative data (alt-data) examples and performance
- Private-sector data sources and examples:
  - Payroll processor ADP handles one in six US workers and provides a monthly jobs report used to supplement official statistics.
  - LinkedIn’s “economic graph” measures 1.2 billion people, 67 million companies, 15 million jobs, 41,000 skills, and 133,000 schools.
  - PriceStats tracks changes in 800,000 daily prices from among 40 million products in 25 economies.
  - Carlyle provided employment trends during the US government shutdown, managing 277 companies with 730,000 employees.
  - Intuit’s QuickBooks-based small-business index was discontinued in 2015 and relaunched with a different methodology in 2023.
- Historical performance and potential improvements:
  - Official US GDP first reported a 3.8 percent decline for Q4 2008, revised to a 6.2 percent decline a month later, and finally recalculated as an 8.9 percent decline in July 2011—highlighting large reporting and revision lags where alt-data might have identified downturns earlier.
  - During the COVID-19 pandemic, smartphone GPS data measured declines in retail visits and adherence to lockdowns, demonstrating how alt-data can fill gaps during crises.

### Strengths, limits, and biases of alt-data
- Strengths:
  - Can fill analytical gaps, especially in developing economies lacking meteorological equipment or statistical capacity (e.g., using cell-tower signal degradation to measure rainfall).
  - Acts as an independent tool for transparency when official data integrity is questioned.
- Limits and biases:
  - Often generated as “data exhaust” and carries biases inherent to the private-sector environment (examples: LinkedIn skewing toward professionals; ADP omitting the gray economy).
  - Private-sector data may disappear or change methodologies (e.g., Intuit), so alt-data should complement, not replace, official statistics.
  - Practical and ethical constraints on collecting hyper-granular personal metrics (health sensors, facial recognition, biosensors), including privacy concerns and potential state overreach.

### Technical and institutional considerations
- Privacy-preserving analytics:
  - Emerging techniques—federated learning, homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computation, and differential privacy—allow analysis without exposing raw personal records; these techniques are nascent but under experimentation by companies and statistical offices.
- Institutional shifts required:
  - Statistical practitioners may need to reconceive their role from solely generating official information to partnering with the private sector to validate and bolster data integrity.
  - Speed of implementation matters: “Unless we concurrently increase the speed of implementation, ‘big data’ is of limited use,” Kenneth Greenspan (interview, 2014) observed.

### Conceptual and normative reflections
- Data is always an abstraction, not the thing itself; it contains an “information quotient” that can rise as measurement improves.
- The expansion of measurable phenomena opens the possibility of creating new metrics (for example, a modernized “misery” metric that aggregates behavioral, financial, and biometric signals), but such metrics raise profound privacy and ethical questions.
- Public sentiment and “techlash” may limit unbridled data collection; paradigms and adoption of new metrics can be slow and contested.

### Practical recommendations (implied within the text)
- Combine official and alternative data sources to leverage complementary strengths and mitigate weaknesses.
- Foster partnerships between statistical agencies and private firms to validate, standardize, and preserve the integrity of alt-data.
- Invest in privacy-preserving analytic techniques and experiment with their deployment to enable useful analysis without exposing individual records.
- Prioritize increasing the speed of implementation for data-driven insights so that faster, more granular indicators can be actionable in policymaking.
- Promote creative use of existing private-sector infrastructure (for example, mobile network data) to fill measurement gaps in resource-constrained settings.

*F&D Magazine — Kenneth Cukier, December 2025*

---

## Content in this bundle

- **The Pulse of the Planet**
  - [The Pulse of the Planet (Markdown version)](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/12/cukier.pdf.md){rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"}
  - [The Pulse of the Planet (PDF)](/-/media/files/publications/fandd/article/2025/12/cukier.pdf){rel="external" type="application/pdf"}

---

_Source: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2025/12/the-pulse-of-the-planet-cukier_