alt Hacker NewsHow hard have you thought about this?
The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions.
A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home.
If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe for people to respond to as possible.
Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.
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This seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.
The census isn't for helping the country make any decisions other than determining the number of representatives and apportionment of taxes. It should not be collecting any data that isn't necessary for that.
I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though.
I don't understand why the census would include SNAP data or income: surely the government already has that information. I have never doubted that the IRS knows my income better than I do. Maybe better use of existing datasets could restrict the census to less invasive questions.
Thank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting
Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.
I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.
> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions.
I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments and agencies (such as the IRS) have most of the rest of the data required to make policy decisions.
Except for gerrymandering purposes, I fail to see why income, party affiliations, etc., is useful for the purpose the census was created for.