Figre out additional information we want to collect

[hazel-bohon]

We're making good progress accumulating crime data, but that's only a small part of the story of the United States. Some additional items to consider:

• employment (https://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm)
• patent applications
• social trust (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/13/americans-divided-on-how-much-they-trust-their-neighbors/ )

Please add suggestions, additional things to track and we can create a complete list. Then, we can update the readme.md to include everything and create some more issues to handle grabbing the info.

[lilianhj]

Other things that have been brought up:

• Housing/rent prices
• Poverty rate
• Health insurance coverage, or some other sort of health metric
• Some education metric - proportion of children enrolled in school?

[MSilb7]

Ideas from an economy standpoint:

• GDP Tracking (maybe filter to specific industries)
• American Stock Market Indices
• USD Value compared to other currencies
• Import/Export Balance

[seanjtaylor]

I do think jobs is probably the right next step. The BLS data poses a challenge because it's monthly and we'd like to give more regular updates. So I want to focus on now-casting the numbers, which is a good statistical modeling project.

The "social trust" one is great and I think opens the discussion for survey-based metrics. We should see if we can recruit someone who has survey expertise. I have experience running surveys, and we'll have to pursue a funding model for survey recruitment, but I think that's something we could drum up.

• Love the idea to have imports/exports in there.
• Patents applications is a great idea, too. I have a friend who worked in the USPTO, I'll ask him if the application data is public.
• Stock prices I'm skeptical of us adding much value there, unless we figure out a novel industry breakdown.

[jsta]

• Agriculture Production/Subsidies
• Fisheries Landings
• Reservoir(Dam) construction/removal