The city of Boston stands as a gleaming example of the renewed and widespread appreciation for urban living. Its charms, after all, are abundant, from 18th century Beacon Hill streets to dynamic and diverse SOWA, the “new” South End. Plus it has been honored for its strong public schools (2006 winner of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, no less). All of which makes the new report, The Measure of Poverty: A Boston Indicators Project Special Report, something of a bombshell.

The Boston Indicators Project is the widely honored data-and-analysis special initiative run by the Boston Foundation with a host of partners in Greater Boston’s Civic Community. It is headed by Charlotte Kahn (honored in Istanbul in 2007 for her work) who is a leader in a global movement to create indicators initiatives, using open-source data collected from a wide array of credible sources to examine current trends and realities from the grass roots to broad regions.

Justification for the use of the b-word? Here are a few selected data points for consideration—drawn, I repeat, from the heart of one of the most economically successful places in the United States:

• As many as 340,000 Bostonians now live in poverty (excluding college students) or stand at risk of being unable to afford such necessities as housing, food, transportation, child care and energy. That represents more than half of the total population of Boston.
• Income inequality is bad and continues to grow worse. Despite Boston’s recent economic successes, Suffolk County remains one of the 50 most unequal in the United States. In 2009, the top 5 percent of Boston earners received 25 percent of total annual income in the city while the bottom 20 percent earned just 2.2 percent of the total.
• Health care costs, already the highest in the nation, are expected to double by 2020. Meanwhile, social investment in programs that offer a significant return on the dollar are being slashed, promising downward economic pressure in years to come. Cuts in state funding for services from fiscal years 2009 and 2012 include the following: universal pre-kindergarten, cut 38 percent; teen pregnancy prevention, cut 41 percent; health promotion and disease prevention, cut by 77 percent; and employment services, cut 80 percent.

I find this report compelling for two reasons. First, I know Kahn to be a scrupulous and rigorous curator of data (she was a colleague when I worked for the Boston Foundation) with a prophetic voice that has—unfortunately—been validated consistently in recent years. This report deserves to be read and pondered far beyond the borders of Boston.

And the second reason is because at the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), I spend much of my time looking for ways to highlight the power and utility of data as a critical tool for expanding the impact of philanthropic funders.

Real tension exists between the visceral power of anecdotal presentation and the sometimes challenging reality of actual fact. In a similar work of data-driven exposure, this tension is a major theme of the book Poor Economics, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, which speaks powerfully about the value of scientific investigation in the search for effective strategies that address the causes and effects of global poverty.

The point here is that our untested hunches often fail to provide a credible read of the world around us. The discipline of high quality research and data analysis brings us to a better understanding. In The Measure of Poverty, the better understanding is a sobering assessment of trends that are eroding common assumptions about the United States as a land of opportunity where the American Dream is a plausible aspiration. In Poor Economics, the better understanding is about the efficacy of common strategies to improve the lot of those with the least—and offers the better news of proven success in alternative methods that are tested and found effective.

This seems to be especially important right now, as we move toward a national election and the broad issues of where we are as a country and what we should be doing to address a long list or urgent needs. Policy decisions and the design and application of strategy—in the civic arena, for foundations, and the philanthropic sector more broadly—seem critical. Yet the air is full of unsupported assertions and sweeping summaries that don’t really bear scrutiny.

The Boston Foundation’s special report makes the point in a significant American context that Poor Economics makes in a global context: we can’t afford to make important decisions about philanthropic investment based on anecdotal evidence and our own hunches, however strongly held.

In the final analysis, data should be the decider.

David Trueblood is Vice President – Communications & Programming at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.