Data is Plural: “Different datasets have different answers, cover different timeframes, and use different methodologies. Miriam Barnum et al.’s Global Military Spending Dataset attempts to bring them together. By uniting “76 variables from 9 dataset collection projects,” the authors write, “we provide the most comprehensive and complete set of published datasets on military spending ever assembled.” Each of the variables represents one source/methodology, and each observation is a country-year. “Disagreement on the actual expenditure value for a given country-year is common, even between datasets produced by the same project,” they find. Previously: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Military Expenditure Database (DIP 2017.03.29), one of the sources.”