Judd Gregg rann for the door yesterday to escape from being installed as Commerce secretary in Obama’s administration. Part of why he got the willies was that he did not like Obama’s idea of forcing the Census to operate under the watchful eyes of the White House.
Here’s what our constitution says about the census:
“[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”
Generally, and to this point in time, the word Enumeration and the phrase in such Manner as they shall by Law direct has been interpreted to mean “Everybody will be physically counted.”
So, once every decade, Census workers pop outdoors and start tallying bodies.
Everybody agrees that it is practically impossible to count every single citizen because some of us are pretty good at hiding when we see government agents heading in our direction. Other people, starved for attention, offer themselves up more than once. The gist: the official count has some error.
Some statisticians heard about this predicament and offered up their services. “We have experience making up numbers where none exist,” they said, “so we can estimate the people that are missed. To do this, we will use comforting-inducing complicated mathematical formulae. It’s science.”
This reasoning is, as readers of this blog know, irresistible to certain people. Labeling something science is enough to offer it immunity from probing or dissection. How, after all, can we mere mortals argue with science?
Other politicians liked the idea that statisticians didn’t need to actually physically count people. They could just grab a few here and there, call that a survey, plug the survey into some equations, and out would pop the desired numbers. Much cheaper and vastly quicker.
An added bonus is that the survey-method would let Census statisticians create a scientific guess on the size of any disaffected group of choice a politician might care to ask about. This was an enormous advantage because most politicians argued strenuously that their disaffected group was under-counted in the Census. The affected groups, they said, were counted just fine.
The Census is used to count how many citizens there are and where they live. These numbers are then used to gerrymander—no, sorry, draw up Congressional districts and allocate numbers of representatives. Areas which have fewer people have fewer politicians assigned to watch over them.
This idea is abhorrent to the politicians who might lose their jobs if the Census finds that fewer people now live under their jurisdiction. Thus, the loudest cries of “under-count!” are from those leaders in areas which have lost population. They are therefore eager to find a way to boost their numbers, and the best way to do that is to drag out the slogan “disaffected group!” or one of its variants.
Why is this so? Because the survey-method can, and does, count non-citizens. Now, non-citizens are fine people, but they are just what they sound like: non citizens. By trivial definition, they should not be counted as part of the official count of citizens. But if they are counted, and they are input into the arcane algorithms, they will increase the estimate of the count of people living in the area in which they were surveyed.
The mathematical apparatus that the statisticians have constructed has myriad knobs, levers, and switches that can be tweaked to produce numbers either higher or lower as directed. Twist this knob and Ames, Iowa goes up 2%, flip that switch and San Francisco drops 4%.
It would be very tempting for somebody to play with those controls to massage the numbers so that, say, the tenets of social justice are obeyed, and Congressional districts are apportioned to favor those politicians that are more properly Enlightened. A higher good is being served this way.
Which is why exactly why Obama would not want to bring a department that had been operating just fine before he came to us under his wing. Instead, presumably, he just likes statisticians around him (who doesn’t?). Obviously, he would not meddle with the independence of the Census. That is why he is drawing it closer. To not meddle.
We statisticians are lovely folk—we know some great jokes, and can integrate multidimensional integrals faster than you can crack open a peanut—but we cannot be trusted to not play with our own creations, especially when our bosses, eager for a certain result, are watching over our shoulders.
Let’s just stick with enumerate.