Juan Enriquez believes that we are going to have trouble keeping up with all the
data coming our way. He explains the data explosion in his essay, “Reflection in a Digital
Mirror.” He says: “Most modern humans are now attempting to cram more data into their
heads in a single day than most of our ancestors did during entire lifetimes.” He goes on
to say that in the time it takes to read his essay, “the amount of information generated by
the human race will have expanded by about 20 petabytes.” That is equivalent to about
three times the amount of information currently in the Library of Congress.

We are trying to keep up. He estimates that we “try to cram in, read, understand,
and remember at least 5 percent more words than the year before.” That essentially
means that five years ago we were trying to cope with 100,000 words per day. Now we
are trying to cope with 130,000 words per day. He doesn’t say it, but I will say it. There
has to be an upper limit. I think we are reaching it in trying to keep up with the data.

The good news is that we don’t have to collect, catalogue, and analyze all the
data. Computers with powerful algorithms can do much of it. If the collection and
analyzation is done well, we will benefit greatly from this tsunami of data. We will go
from sampling the available data to having a collection of enormous data sets. We will
know the world around us in unprecedented ways.

The explosion of digital data is also unprecedented. Juan Enriquez estimates that
in 1986, only 6 percent of the world’s data was digital. The world wide web was still
three years away. There was no Google or any of the services that we take for granted
today. Now more than 99 percent of the world’s written words, images, music, and data
are in digital form.

On the one hand we are drowning in a sea of data. On the other hand, we have
access to this data because we live in a digital world. Now if we can just keep up with it.

Academics are calling it “The Great Crossover.” It is a report that documents the
fact that for the first time in history the median age of American women having babies is
lower than the median age of marriage. That’s another way of saying that more and more
women are having children out of wedlock.

The report from the Manhattan Institute talks about these “dramatic changes in
childbearing.” The most significant is the fact that 48 percent of first births are by unwed
mothers. By age 30, two-thirds of American women have had a child.

One reason is a change in perception. Some of us grew up hearing the playground
song, “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in a baby carriage.”
Many women today separate the idea of marriage and children.

The report put is this way. “Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to
see marriage as a ‘capstone’ rather than a ‘cornerstone’— that is, something they do after
they have all their ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood
and parenthood.”

What the report calls “The Great Crossover” is a result of this disconnect between
marriage and children. In this down economy, its not surprising that many young
people are delaying marriage. But delayed marriage doesn’t necessarily mean delayed
motherhood.

Children are brought into the world without the stablizing influence of two
parents in a committed marriage. This is detrimental to children during their formative
years. “Researchers now view family instability as one of the greatest risks to children’s
well being,” the report states. “Yet unmarried adults, including single 20-somethings who
make up about half of unmarried parents, are by definition unsettled.”

The church and Christian organizations dedicated to helping marriages and
families must work to reverse this trend. “The Great Crossover” of increasing numbers of
unwed mothers is a troubling trend we must address.

Now that a month has passed since sequestration, many have suggested
reasonable ways in which the government could cut spending. Isn’t it possible to trim
the budget without inflicting pain or inconvenience on too many people? Here are some
suggestions from politicians, pundits, and average citizens of possible spending cuts.

Let’s start with the National Endowment for the Arts. Many people believe it
should be defunded, but perhaps we could start by no longer allowing it to dole out
$1 million to book clubs. How about the Pentagon? It spent $1.5 million to develop
it own beef jerky and $6 million to study the “science of storytelling.” Senator Tom
Coburn called the Pentagon the “Department of Everything,” because it even funds
microbreweries and grocery stores.

Some have suggested taking a hard look at Amtrak. After all, it lost $84.5 million
on its federally subsidized food and beverage service. And while we are talking about
railroads, the federal government gave California $3.5 billion for a high speed train
project that has been riddled with mismanagement.

The National Science Foundation may be funding important research, but many
pundits have made fun of its grant of $325,000 to create a robotic squirrel to study how it
might interact with a rattlesnake. We might also mention the $700,000 it gave to a theater
company for a climate change musical.

The food stamp program has exploded over the last few years. No one wants
to harm people who are in need. But you have to wonder if we could at least address
the recent revelation that food stamp recipients spend $2 billion of taxpayer dollars on
unhealthy drinks.

The administration threatens to cut back on the air traffic controllers and TSA
agents while a congressional report documents that the TSA “is wasting hundred of
millions of taxpayer dollars.” Let’s start with the waste instead of cutting programs that
hurt people the most.

Nearly a century ago, a dystopian novel imagined a world where every building
was made of glass so that various authorities could monitor what citizens were doing
every minute of the day. Dan Gardner suggests that the world of Big Data already makes
that possible. (“Big Data could know us better than we know ourselves,” Ottawa Citizen,
April 27, 2012).

In previous commentaries, I have mentioned the term “Big Data.” It describes the
continuous accumulation and analysis of information. There is a reason people are calling
it “Big Data.” Some estimate that humans now create in two days the same amount of
data that it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to create. They predict that will
soon be creating that same amount every few hours.

Dan Gardner says we are awash in an ocean of information. “Every time someone
clicks on something at Amazon, it’s recorded and another drop is added to the ocean. . . .
Every time a customs officer checks a passport, every time someone posts to Facebook,
every time someone does a Google search – the ocean swells.”

Anyone who has access to that data can begin to use powerful computer
algorithms to sift through texts, purchases, posts, photos, and videos to extract more data
and trends. Gardner says it will be able to extract meaning and “sort through masses of
numbers and find the hidden pattern, the unexpected correlation, the surprising
connection. That ability is growing at astonishing speed.”

We actually welcome some aspect of “Big Data.” When I buy a book online from
Amazon, it recommends other books I might want to know about and purchase. When I
buy a book at Barnes and Noble, the register receipt instantaneously prints out a list of
other books similar to the one I just purchased.

This ocean of “Big Data” is also intrusive. The government, businesses, and even
hackers can paint a picture of you that is more accurate than you might want them to
know. It is as if we do live in a world where all the buildings are made of glass.

It may be April Fool’s Day, but the real prank may be on the American people
when they begin to see that the dollars in their pockets buy less and less. The U.S.
government has borrowed too much. Nations like China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others
aren’t buying our debt. The only alternative is for the U.S. government to crank up the
printing presses at the Federal Reserve.

I have been reading columns by others who are saying the same thing. Consider
the words of George Will. He said that an “embarrassing auditor of American
misgovernment is China, whose premier has rightly noted the unsustainable trajectory of
America’s high-consumption, low-savings economy. He has also decorously but clearly
expressed sensible fears that his country’s $1 trillion-plus denominated assets might be
devalued by America, choosing, as banana republics have done, to use inflation for
partial repudiation of improvidently incurred debts.”

Some of the printing of money has already begun. The Federal Reserve is buying
billions in Treasury bonds and has also spent billions more in buying sub-prime
mortgages in order to remove them from the balance sheets of banks. Inflation will
increase as more of this fiat money makes it way into the economy.

Pat Buchanan says that: “inflation is theft. It makes liars and cheats of
governments. By eroding the value of a currency, inflation punishes savers and creditors
and rewards debtors. And what nation is the biggest debtor of all? The United States of
America.”

He is right. Inflation devalues the cash in your pocket, the savings in your bank,
and the investments that you hold. The dollars you spend are worth less, and the
investments you have will be paid back in devalued dollars. Inflation is not only theft but
a form of robbery perpetrated by the government. On this April Fool’s Day, it turns out
that inflation is the biggest prank of all.