1 The Us Census Why Our Numbers Matter printable pdf download

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The U.S. Census: Why Our Numbers Matter

I still bear the mental scars of a question on a philosophy exam in college

that left me whimpering at its wicked simplicity: "Could the number two change its

properties?" I'd been raised to think numbers were as close to reliable as anything could

be, so clean and clear and immune to argument. Some are odd, some round, some lucky,

but three will always be one less than four.

This is the season when we are reminded that you can safely and reliably count just

about anything other than people. Census comes from the Latin censere, which, tellingly,

does not mean count so much as estimate, and 2,500 years ago in Rome, people were

already squirrelly about being estimated. The penalty for refusing to reveal how many

people were in your household, how many slaves, how much livestock, was forfeiting it

all and becoming a slave yourself. The Bible tells the story of God getting so mad at King

David for ordering a census (granted, it was because Satan had talked him into it) that He

sent a plague that killed 70,000 people in three days.

David's plague may have deterred census takers for many years, but when the

Founding Fathers invented American democracy, they realized that if you are going to

have government by the people, you need to know who and where they are. The founders

stuck a Census requirement in the Constitution so that every 10 years, the young, stretchy

country would recalculate which states got how many lawmakers. They worried that a

state might try to inflate its population to increase its representation, so they cleverly

arranged that the first Census would also be used to spread around the costs of the

Revolution. In 1790, 650 federal marshals on horseback began going house to house. It

cost $45,000 and took a year and a half to count 3.9 million people.

Two hundred twenty years later, lawmakers are so unpopular, it's a wonder people

fight over the means of getting more of them — except that nowadays about $400 billion

per year in federal aid follows the Census numbers, for everything from jobs to bridges to

schools, so this really matters.

Of course, there would be more money to spread around if it didn't cost so much to

count us in the first place: about $15 billion, according to some estimates. That includes

$338 million for ads in 28 languages, a Census-sponsored NASCAR entry, hiring Marie

Osmond to do outreach on QVC, $2.5 million for a Super Bowl ad and spots on Spanish

radio and soap operas and Dora the Explorer. The ads are meant to boost the response

rate, since any household that doesn't mail back its form gets visited by a Census worker,

another pricey line item. In all, it will work out to about $49 per person, which makes you

wonder whether the government should have just sent an e-mail instead of a packet that

looks like junk mail. (How about spending a little more money on design?) But the

Census officials worried about privacy, so the increasingly irrelevant post office, whose

volume dropped 13% last year, gets a spring boost.

Why would anyone not want to be counted? Illegal immigrants fear exposure,

despite laws forbidding any court or agency from seeing the information; indiscreet

Secondary Reading High School, Supplemental Articles 910, December 13, 2011

1 The Us Census Why Our Numbers Matter