Pretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.

I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise.

I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse.

We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.