ARMY OF DAVIDS, STATISTICS DIVISION: My latest Bloomberg View column looks at a startup using more than 30,000 smart-phone-wielding contractors to collect economic data, “peering into hard-to-reach places, identifying emerging trends and providing a check on official numbers. Particularly useful in developing countries, this grassroots data collection may, like the phones themselves, allow formerly lagging countries to leapfrog 20th-century approaches and establish flexible, nuanced and decentralized ways of answering economic questions.” Read the whole thing here.