I like David Roodman’s post on the Data revolution. He points out one of the obvious reasons why it is hard to make sense of what it is supposed to mean:
“Data,” understood broadly, is like “documents”: inarguably important, but not a good organizing concept for a broad social project. Do we also need a “document revolution”?
I suspect part of the reason is that Data Revolution sounds good, while Statistics Revolution does not.
The second part of Roodman’s blog is also good – and I agree with most of he says (for my own statement see an earlier post).