Policy Indicators: a Continuing and Needed Field

The social indicator movement has always faced in two directions—toward academic disciplines that provide quality control and estimate causal relations, and toward the political system that chooses and uses indicator statistics. At worst, the movement has risked appearing to be peripheral to both theoretical social science and policy choice; such perceptions may have contributed to the movement's weakening. The use of noneconomic time series of data to guide the definition of public problems, however, did not and will not die away.