Hype about using enormous sets of sensor-collected data to “drive results” in US cities is getting pretty thick. Local government officials across the country are overrun by vendors offering to install soup-to-nuts systems that will monitor parking, pedestrians, pollution, and pests, among a zillion other things. It’s as if the big tech companies are baffled by why local government needs to exist at all. “We’ve got engineers! We’ll do it for you!” is the implicit pitch. McKinsey says the global Internet of Things market may be worth as much as $6.2 trillion over the next few years.

Susan Crawford is a columnist for Backchannel and a professor at Harvard Law School. She is also the author of The Responsive City and Captive Audience. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

But all that data won’t help if it doesn’t address the most vital issues in our cities. And one of the most vital of all is inequality of opportunity.

One thing we know about Boston, a great US city whose metro area is home to some great American universities (including my employer, Harvard), is that its African-American and Latino populations aren’t capturing their shares of opportunities these days. What if one key “result” that Boston wants and needs is greater social mobility for all of its people? What contribution will data make to “drive” that result? And how will public policy need to change to take that data into account? The city is about to announce a fascinating new start of an answer: an Economic Mobility Lab, housed in the Mayor's Office.

Here’s the backstory. A Brookings study of US cities made waves a few years ago, showing that inequality in major cities and metro areas was high and rising. Boston was number one on the list of the 100 largest US cities—the most unequal of all—with an 18:1 ratio between the incomes of the top 5 percent and the bottom 20 percent. Yes, Boston’s large student population was probably represented in that lowest 20 percent of income earners. Still, Boston, widely perceived as a city on the move following the 20-year reign of Mayor Thomas Menino (see “Two Decades of Change Have Boston Sparkling”), had some explaining to do.

The facts are damning. Some 20 percent of Boston’s population, and more than 30 percent of the city's families with children, is living in poverty and has been for decades. This disparity between sparkle and poverty falls largely along lines of race. Some higher-minority areas (Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury) are wildly overrepresented in comparison to other parts of the city when it comes to unemployment and low educational attainment.

Boston is one of the most residentially segregated metropolitan regions in the country. White families in Boston have a median net worth of more than $240,000 (likely based on home and business ownership), while African-American families have a median net worth of essentially nothing. More than 60 percent of all jobs in Boston are filled by (largely white) commuters, who are overrepresented in high-paying sectors like finance and technical services.

All of this is a problem for Mayor Marty Walsh, who is determined to “bring real opportunity and prosperity to every corner” of the city.

Boston is a classic example of inequality’s role in undermining economic mobility. The city doesn’t score well when it comes to economic mobility: It’s below average in helping poor children up the income ladder, and is doing worse than about 75 percent of the country’s counties. (The situation is worse in Boston for poor girls than it is for poor boys.) And low social mobility in Boston, as in many other metro regions of the US, is often stubbornly intergenerational, intertwined with income and race segregation, crime rates, and poor schools.

In short, economic mobility—who is moving up, who is moving down, and why—is a big, thorny, long-term issue for Boston.

And that’s why it’s so interesting that the city is planning to gather and maintain longitudinal data deep into the future that may help explain what’s going on and what policy levers can change the situation. The new cross-agency project, housed in the Mayor’s Office, is called the Economic Mobility Lab, and it has gotten initial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

It’s an intentional effort, led from the top, to embed in all city departments an ongoing commitment to data collection that will shed light on systemic racism as well as programs and policies that appear to mitigate its effects. That commitment will be designed to survive any change in mayoral leadership. Then the city can adopt policies and gather support for efforts to make the ladder of opportunity real in Boston. As far as I know, the Economic Mobility Lab doesn’t have a counterpart elsewhere in America.