> This means [it eliminated] literally a third of the time allocated for the Census Bureau to knock on doors, to try to enumerate the hard-to-count individuals, which happen to be African Americans, Latinx populations, immigrants, people in heavily transitory situations, tribal lands, some Asians.
Random question but why would some races have more trouble than others responding to the census? Is it more to do with poverty than race? Or is there a cultural distrust of the census that aligns with race?
There are many reasons. They discuss poverty in the article. I would agree with cultural distrust of government officials. And very importantly, everything around the citizenship question/issue.
> The notion of these counts ever being used for enforcement — basically targeting high population, low citizenship-count blocks for ICE raids or whatever — that would be really, really problematic.
Stepping back, think in general about a government that wants to target, arrest, and deport certain groups of people, that is also going door to door and trying to establish records of who everyone is and where they live. Because of the bad optics of this, the US census has traditionally been extremely independent from law enforcement. The government has recently been attacking this barrier e.g. with the citizenship question and other things discussed in the article. Historically speaking, you might argue marginalized groups in such scenarios would be foolish to trust the census.
> If you’re hard to count, you’re hard to count. The people who are hardest to count, the ones we worry most about in terms of undercount, are the same folks whose families don’t have food at night or don’t have a job. They’re worried about getting tossed out because they can’t make the rent. Or they’re ill and don’t have health insurance. Those folks tend not to have participating in the census at the top of their minds because they have basic needs that have to be met — for themselves, their children and sometimes for their parents and grandparents.
Statistician (but not a Census statistician) here with a few answers:
Black people have a higher than average non-response rate, even controlling for income, possibly due to a cultural mistrust of government institutions (for good reason).
Recent immigrants may not be able to read the language the census was mailed to them in, and may also be hesitant to respond due to fears of deportation- the point of the census isn’t to hunt down illegals, and people here legally shouldn’t be deported anyway, but the current administration hasn’t done much to reassure people. These effects will apply in differing amounts to Latino and Asian communities.
Finally, the bulk of the census is conducted by mail, and it takes a while to complete. Families without a permanent home might not be counted because they are only temporarily living with another family when the census arrives at that house, or they might be moving between addresses so that they aren’t counted in the response by any household at those addresses. This also disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
And at least for me, I only received instructions in the mail telling me to do the census online. Not all families have easy access to the internet, and some just can’t be bothered to take the time to respond. This again disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
To try to counteract these problems, the Census hires people to walk on foot and get responses from low coverage areas. But if you cut down on that effort, you’re going to miss some. One of the results of this could be that the census shows fewer poor people in some cities which will affect government funding decisions. But the tough part for a statistician is showing how much time is needed to walk around and get the coverage that you desire (and how many people you hire to do it). You can make some relatively small changes to your assumptions and get different answers. But cutting the time by a third is a pretty dramatic cut, so without looking at the details, I’m guessing that the coverage has decreased. That’s generally a bad thing since a census is supposed to be a full count of the population and not a sample.
Edit: I’ll also tack on a more nefarious interpretation than just using the Census to cut federal aid money to some cities. The Census is also used to portion electoral college votes for presidential elections. Because of the communities that are affected by this undercoverage, states that normally vote Democrat are more likely to lose votes than states that normally vote Republican. So this could make it easier for a Republican president to be elected in the next couple elections (the votes for the current election will not change however).
Q: Do you have any sense for how many people might have been counted had the census efforts continued to Oct. 31?
> It’s not going to be much. If you’re hard to count, you’re hard to count. The people who are hardest to count, the ones we worry most about in terms of undercount, are the same folks whose families don’t have food at night or don’t have a job. They’re worried about getting tossed out because they can’t make the rent. Or they’re ill and don’t have health insurance. Those folks tend not to have participating in the census at the top of their minds because they have basic needs that have to be met — for themselves, their children and sometimes for their parents and grandparents.
> Because of those things that those people have to deal with, you actually could have extended the time for another month on top of that and you’d only get marginal gains. The census was already in a tough position. It would definitely help to get as much time as possible, because as people become acquainted with how to deal with Covid, they can do the grassroots effort that’s needed to get people to participate. But it’s going to be a marginal increase. At the end of the day, the die has been cast for quite a while: There are going to be undercounts of communities of color. The only question is how large — and is it so large that action needs to be taken in the form of litigation or legislation.
Among other things, safety for minorities. The census is supposed to be secret and never used for any sort of law enforcement, etc. But in our living memory that protection was abused. The US census was used to help round up Americans of Japanese descent and put them in concentration camps in the 40s.
It'd be nice to think that could never happen again. But then you had the Trump people literally trying to put a citizenship question on the census despite every expert saying it was a mistake. The intent was clearly to intimidate (we have this in writing). The question ended up being left off but the damage was already somewhat done.
American blacks were more hit by corona virus for example.
American black are incarcerated more often which affects whole community. Ex prisoners and their families have unique housing stability problems.
Their family structure is different - more single women with or without children as males are not available. Also, more tight communities. Less of nuclear family more of extended family.
White people live more segregated per socioeconomic class, black mix more. Blacks and white are segregated anyway, so whatever you do you are not reaching both.
Here is some inside info. I work for the Census.
It is a highly dysfunctional organization. Nothing to do with current administration.
The various software the local offices use actively hinders the job of management and enumerators (the people who come to your door). Hundreds of and hundred of millions of dollars and incalculable time is wasted just due to this. Imagine the worst ERP or CRM that you have ever used, this is worse and approximately 250 offices use it across the country, and this inhibits the jobs of nearly half a million people.
Talk to any Area manager, Lead Census Field Manager/Field manager, Office Operation Supervisor, or Office Clerk. They will tell you how they have to fight the software to get their job done.
Truth is the Census could be done with half the people. There is plain incompetence in middle and higher management. Those making decision on software and marketing seem to have no understanding of the job those in local offices do. It is so bad local offices don't really have an accurate idea who even is still employed in the field working cases.
Why doesn't this change? Nobody wants to lose their job. Middle management wants numbers and to hit goals. It doesn't matter if the numbers are actually accurate. Often they will not be. Notes about cases (organizations we are trying to count their people/or individual housing units) pile up inside systems that nobody has time to read. It is easier to close a case then actually resolve it and accurately count people.
Not only is there no incentive to do the job correctly, it will actually get you in trouble if you do things right.
Yes this is a random throwaway account on HN. But to verify just ask nearly anyone who works for the Census. I hope to post more on this later when I have time. Feel free to ask any questions.
A big part of why Census doesn't operate better is the Republicans chronically underfund it. This entire census cycle was the Trump Administration's responsibility. If Census lacks the tools and capabilities to execute it, it's on them.
Successful management of anything -- a startup, a corporation, or an entire country -- requires successful measurement.
Successful measurement requires collecting good, accurate data.
Sabotaging the census is tantamount to sabotaging the government's ability to run the country.
It's the sort of thing that in my mind should be able to happen only in poorly-run countries managed by corrupt regimes.
The leading statistician claiming that the census is being sabotaged, Robert Santos, was recently elected as President of the American Statistical Association. We should probably take his claims seriously.
I find it almost unbelievable that this is happening in the United States of America.
From what I can tell, a second (third?) census extension is being denied. It’s not that the census is unusually being cut short. I got a different impression from this article.
The census bureau was original granted an extension that has been rolled back. It's not being cut "unusually" short, but the pandemic drastically impacted the census bureau's ability to do their work, and we are giving them less extra time than they say they need.
I am a little skeptical about how dire this will really be. Census takers are allowed to guesstimate if non-responses reasonably make them believe they are undercounting:
>In instances where the bureau is unsure of the number of residents at an address after a field visit, its population characteristics are inferred from its nearest similar neighbor (hot-deck imputation). This practice has effects across many areas, but is seen by some as controversial.[6] However, the practice was ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Utah v. Evans.
Counting illegal immigrants in the census helps Democrats because liberal states have more of them. This is just a fact. You may think we should still count as many of them in the census, that's fine. But don't pretend there is no issue with one side of the argument.
Mentioning motives of one side but not the other is naive. It also prevents us from having a real conversation about the trade offs at hand.
Things that you hear from Turkey or Brazil or Belarus or some other distant "third-world" or even "communist" countries are happening right in our own backyard.
If we were not the superpower country, we would have already got "sanctions" but no one can yet. But the next time America sanctions other countries for human rights or governance, rest assured they will laugh it off.
I realize for political reasons we have to only support one side via extreme sophistry, essentially the whole topic is a giant dog whistle test to make sure our community is politically pure.
However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills.
Part of the sophistry is pretending that no non-white people are capable of responding to documents mailed to them and as such will be entirely disenfranchised. However, the actual percentage simply cannot be that high as 73 percent of households have satellite or cable TV and thus are at least occasionally responding to mailed documents. 73 percent of the population isn't even white anymore.
I mean, yeah, as a political purity test we can rally around Orange Man Bad and try to one up each other in our two minutes hate to eliminate diversity of opinion while encouraging groupthink, but reality is so far from the politics in this particular situation that its hard to play along. And if an individual can't stomach the extreme virtue signallers, may as well join the reality-based community and just vote Trump. So ironically I don't think this topic is a PRODUCTIVE purity test even from a purely leftist perspective.
> However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills.
"essentially 100%" is an overstatement. Federal Reserve data (see e.g. Figure 12 here [1]) consistently shows that quite a few Americans have difficulty paying bills. For example, ~25% of surveyed Americans with a high school degree or less said they couldn't pay that month's bills. That number gets smaller with more education but is always 50-100% larger for black and Hispanic people.
It seems reasonable to me that people juggling various overdue bills might not prioritize responding to a census that has 0 short-term positive impact. It also seems reasonable to me that we make an extra effort to count these people since the point of the census is to count everybody, not just people who are easy to count.
You seem to be extremely certain of your position and seem to find it impossible to believe that Robert Santos, the statistician in question, could have any motive other than a political one in sounding the alarm. However, "if people can pay their electric bill then surely they can respond to the census" is not a fact and it's not a logical argument, it's just your gut feeling, which you seem to find a superior source of truth to what experts are saying. Why?
Trying to sidestep democracy is how you end up with armed revolt. I wish both sides would realizing their destroying people’s faith in the system and how quickly that can destabilize everything.
> I wish both sides would realizing their destroying people’s faith in the system
And I wish people would stop saying 'both sides' when it's 95% only one side. That's the issue. One side is now against census so people aren't represented, restricting voting so people don't get a say, and people keep saying 'both sides'.
Ha be really clear dude in this case, in this article it is not both sides. It is solidly the current administration and no one else. Our current party in power has done this.
So to retype what you said more correctly.
"I wish the Republicans would realize they are destroying..."
[+] [-] CincinnatiMan|5 years ago|reply
Random question but why would some races have more trouble than others responding to the census? Is it more to do with poverty than race? Or is there a cultural distrust of the census that aligns with race?
[+] [-] bo1024|5 years ago|reply
> The notion of these counts ever being used for enforcement — basically targeting high population, low citizenship-count blocks for ICE raids or whatever — that would be really, really problematic.
Stepping back, think in general about a government that wants to target, arrest, and deport certain groups of people, that is also going door to door and trying to establish records of who everyone is and where they live. Because of the bad optics of this, the US census has traditionally been extremely independent from law enforcement. The government has recently been attacking this barrier e.g. with the citizenship question and other things discussed in the article. Historically speaking, you might argue marginalized groups in such scenarios would be foolish to trust the census.
[+] [-] tsjq|5 years ago|reply
> If you’re hard to count, you’re hard to count. The people who are hardest to count, the ones we worry most about in terms of undercount, are the same folks whose families don’t have food at night or don’t have a job. They’re worried about getting tossed out because they can’t make the rent. Or they’re ill and don’t have health insurance. Those folks tend not to have participating in the census at the top of their minds because they have basic needs that have to be met — for themselves, their children and sometimes for their parents and grandparents.
[+] [-] parsimo2010|5 years ago|reply
Black people have a higher than average non-response rate, even controlling for income, possibly due to a cultural mistrust of government institutions (for good reason).
Recent immigrants may not be able to read the language the census was mailed to them in, and may also be hesitant to respond due to fears of deportation- the point of the census isn’t to hunt down illegals, and people here legally shouldn’t be deported anyway, but the current administration hasn’t done much to reassure people. These effects will apply in differing amounts to Latino and Asian communities.
Finally, the bulk of the census is conducted by mail, and it takes a while to complete. Families without a permanent home might not be counted because they are only temporarily living with another family when the census arrives at that house, or they might be moving between addresses so that they aren’t counted in the response by any household at those addresses. This also disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
And at least for me, I only received instructions in the mail telling me to do the census online. Not all families have easy access to the internet, and some just can’t be bothered to take the time to respond. This again disproportionately affects poor people and minorities.
To try to counteract these problems, the Census hires people to walk on foot and get responses from low coverage areas. But if you cut down on that effort, you’re going to miss some. One of the results of this could be that the census shows fewer poor people in some cities which will affect government funding decisions. But the tough part for a statistician is showing how much time is needed to walk around and get the coverage that you desire (and how many people you hire to do it). You can make some relatively small changes to your assumptions and get different answers. But cutting the time by a third is a pretty dramatic cut, so without looking at the details, I’m guessing that the coverage has decreased. That’s generally a bad thing since a census is supposed to be a full count of the population and not a sample.
Edit: I’ll also tack on a more nefarious interpretation than just using the Census to cut federal aid money to some cities. The Census is also used to portion electoral college votes for presidential elections. Because of the communities that are affected by this undercoverage, states that normally vote Democrat are more likely to lose votes than states that normally vote Republican. So this could make it easier for a Republican president to be elected in the next couple elections (the votes for the current election will not change however).
[+] [-] zaroth|5 years ago|reply
> It’s not going to be much. If you’re hard to count, you’re hard to count. The people who are hardest to count, the ones we worry most about in terms of undercount, are the same folks whose families don’t have food at night or don’t have a job. They’re worried about getting tossed out because they can’t make the rent. Or they’re ill and don’t have health insurance. Those folks tend not to have participating in the census at the top of their minds because they have basic needs that have to be met — for themselves, their children and sometimes for their parents and grandparents.
> Because of those things that those people have to deal with, you actually could have extended the time for another month on top of that and you’d only get marginal gains. The census was already in a tough position. It would definitely help to get as much time as possible, because as people become acquainted with how to deal with Covid, they can do the grassroots effort that’s needed to get people to participate. But it’s going to be a marginal increase. At the end of the day, the die has been cast for quite a while: There are going to be undercounts of communities of color. The only question is how large — and is it so large that action needs to be taken in the form of litigation or legislation.
[+] [-] Retric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|5 years ago|reply
It'd be nice to think that could never happen again. But then you had the Trump people literally trying to put a citizenship question on the census despite every expert saying it was a mistake. The intent was clearly to intimidate (we have this in writing). The question ended up being left off but the damage was already somewhat done.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/17/us/report-says-census-bur... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03...
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
American black are incarcerated more often which affects whole community. Ex prisoners and their families have unique housing stability problems.
Their family structure is different - more single women with or without children as males are not available. Also, more tight communities. Less of nuclear family more of extended family.
White people live more segregated per socioeconomic class, black mix more. Blacks and white are segregated anyway, so whatever you do you are not reaching both.
[+] [-] censusthrowaway|5 years ago|reply
The various software the local offices use actively hinders the job of management and enumerators (the people who come to your door). Hundreds of and hundred of millions of dollars and incalculable time is wasted just due to this. Imagine the worst ERP or CRM that you have ever used, this is worse and approximately 250 offices use it across the country, and this inhibits the jobs of nearly half a million people.
Talk to any Area manager, Lead Census Field Manager/Field manager, Office Operation Supervisor, or Office Clerk. They will tell you how they have to fight the software to get their job done.
Truth is the Census could be done with half the people. There is plain incompetence in middle and higher management. Those making decision on software and marketing seem to have no understanding of the job those in local offices do. It is so bad local offices don't really have an accurate idea who even is still employed in the field working cases.
Why doesn't this change? Nobody wants to lose their job. Middle management wants numbers and to hit goals. It doesn't matter if the numbers are actually accurate. Often they will not be. Notes about cases (organizations we are trying to count their people/or individual housing units) pile up inside systems that nobody has time to read. It is easier to close a case then actually resolve it and accurately count people.
Not only is there no incentive to do the job correctly, it will actually get you in trouble if you do things right.
Yes this is a random throwaway account on HN. But to verify just ask nearly anyone who works for the Census. I hope to post more on this later when I have time. Feel free to ask any questions.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
Is that being discussed? Would be a good way to get away from the 10 year lag data and have real time information to make policy choices.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs702|5 years ago|reply
Successful measurement requires collecting good, accurate data.
Sabotaging the census is tantamount to sabotaging the government's ability to run the country.
It's the sort of thing that in my mind should be able to happen only in poorly-run countries managed by corrupt regimes.
The leading statistician claiming that the census is being sabotaged, Robert Santos, was recently elected as President of the American Statistical Association. We should probably take his claims seriously.
I find it almost unbelievable that this is happening in the United States of America.
[+] [-] CyberRabbi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GavinMcG|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learnstats2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheJoeMan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koboll|5 years ago|reply
>In instances where the bureau is unsure of the number of residents at an address after a field visit, its population characteristics are inferred from its nearest similar neighbor (hot-deck imputation). This practice has effects across many areas, but is seen by some as controversial.[6] However, the practice was ruled constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Utah v. Evans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Census#Procedure
[+] [-] tsjq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ccaleb|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...
[+] [-] woo49|5 years ago|reply
Counting illegal immigrants in the census helps Democrats because liberal states have more of them. This is just a fact. You may think we should still count as many of them in the census, that's fine. But don't pretend there is no issue with one side of the argument.
Mentioning motives of one side but not the other is naive. It also prevents us from having a real conversation about the trade offs at hand.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gvd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_zeros|5 years ago|reply
If we were not the superpower country, we would have already got "sanctions" but no one can yet. But the next time America sanctions other countries for human rights or governance, rest assured they will laugh it off.
[+] [-] VLM|5 years ago|reply
However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills.
Part of the sophistry is pretending that no non-white people are capable of responding to documents mailed to them and as such will be entirely disenfranchised. However, the actual percentage simply cannot be that high as 73 percent of households have satellite or cable TV and thus are at least occasionally responding to mailed documents. 73 percent of the population isn't even white anymore.
I mean, yeah, as a political purity test we can rally around Orange Man Bad and try to one up each other in our two minutes hate to eliminate diversity of opinion while encouraging groupthink, but reality is so far from the politics in this particular situation that its hard to play along. And if an individual can't stomach the extreme virtue signallers, may as well join the reality-based community and just vote Trump. So ironically I don't think this topic is a PRODUCTIVE purity test even from a purely leftist perspective.
[+] [-] croissants|5 years ago|reply
"essentially 100%" is an overstatement. Federal Reserve data (see e.g. Figure 12 here [1]) consistently shows that quite a few Americans have difficulty paying bills. For example, ~25% of surveyed Americans with a high school degree or less said they couldn't pay that month's bills. That number gets smaller with more education but is always 50-100% larger for black and Hispanic people.
It seems reasonable to me that people juggling various overdue bills might not prioritize responding to a census that has 0 short-term positive impact. It also seems reasonable to me that we make an extra effort to count these people since the point of the census is to count everybody, not just people who are easy to count.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-we...
[+] [-] stdbrouw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Schiendelman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rc_mob|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BoiledCabbage|5 years ago|reply
And I wish people would stop saying 'both sides' when it's 95% only one side. That's the issue. One side is now against census so people aren't represented, restricting voting so people don't get a say, and people keep saying 'both sides'.
[+] [-] vvG94KbDUtRa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonetheman|5 years ago|reply
So to retype what you said more correctly. "I wish the Republicans would realize they are destroying..."