The information flows are inadequate. What information that is easily accessible is information that supports a particular view of how the economy works and what is important.

The mainstream media is a business, and the news that flows is the news that helps to keep readers loyal more than anything else. Worse, many parts of the media have become platforms for promoting an ideological perspective on society and the economy.

I am a follower of business news such as Bloomberg News because it serves as a constant reminder of the conversation that dominates decision making. Virtually the only conversation is about the profits of business, the stock prices in capital markets, and macro-economic performance going into GDP growth.

I refer to the terrible trio of dangerous metrics: (1) money profit for business; (2) stock prices for investors; and, (3) GDP growth for investors.

From time to time there are analysts of the economy who appear on the mainstream business news programs and try to move the conversation towards other issues that are having an impact on people, place and planet, but very rapidly the conversation reverts to more about the terrible trio.

Huge amounts of business performance data

There is a huge amount of business performance data inside the corporate system, but very little of this information is ever seen by analysts outside the corporate business. The information is used to the maximum to help the organization earn more profit ... but none of this information is available for any use that relates to impact of economic activity on people, place and planet.

It would be great to have similar detailed information about all the economic activities that impact a place ... and to be able to influence decisions so that the result is better for the place than it would otherwise be.

Surveys

Because it is useful to know something about the behavior of the organization and its performance, interested analysts and others use surveys that make a commitment to keep individual company data private. For most meaningful uses of data, this makes surveys near useless. The data flowing from surveys cannot be used for decision making, nor to hold specific actors accountable for their socio-economic performance.

Information flows between North and South

For the past 40 years the flow of information has been from the North to the South ... essentially the North telling the South what to do. This has not worked well, in large part because the North did not know enough about he South for the information they were sending to be of much use.

This has not worked well ... the structure has been dysfunctional and data flows the wrong way. The result has been failed development. A better situation ... less official interaction and much more private and people to people interaction and more data flows from south to north.

In fact the north has relatively little data, even though a vast amount of analysis is done ... with conclusions that may well be without merit. A large pool of data in the south is almost totally ignored ... even though it could be very useful to inform decision making. A better state of affairs would be for the North to get much more data from the South ... and to get the information into an organized form where it can be easily used for analysis. The North can add value to the data by adding in what the North knows in terms of science and technology and access to financial resources ... and the South can add further value by giving feedback about use of resources and the results being achieved.

There have been changes ... but there is resistance by established organizations that do not want to have a diminished role.

And there is also the role that grand corruption has had on progress facilitated by the large official flows of relief and development assistance and the benefits arising from favored official treatments.