Science & Tech Quote by Austan Goolsbee

Austan Goolsbee slips an entire worldview into the casual phrase "data hound": policy as pursuit, not proclamation. The self-description is almost disarmingly geeky, but it’s also a declaration of method. He isn’t claiming to start with a grand ideological destination; he starts with what can be measured. That posture matters coming from a public servant, where arguments are often staged as moral absolutes while the real fights happen over evidence, proxies, and what counts as "proof."

The telling move is how he frames research direction as something the world, not the researcher, dictates. "I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on" doubles as humility and power. Humility: he concedes the limits of knowledge are set by available records. Power: it quietly legitimizes his conclusions as the output of a system, not a bias. It's a rhetorical inoculation against the common suspicion that economists cherry-pick.

Then the context punchline: "The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior". The subtext is that digital markets didn’t just change shopping; they changed the state’s ability to see. E-commerce produces trails - prices, clicks, transactions - turning corporate behavior into something closer to an observable science experiment. When he says he "naturally drifted toward it", he’s admitting how scholarship follows surveillance-adjacent opportunity: the brightest streetlight attracts the keys you can actually find.

It’s also a quiet warning. If policy becomes data-led, whoever controls the data infrastructure shapes what questions get asked, what harms get counted, and which industries become legible enough to regulate.