American Consequences - March 2020

POWER IN THE CENSUS The framers of the Constitution mandated a count of all people every 10 years, in order to allocate seats in Congress and the Electoral College on the basis of each state’s population. The results of the census shift political power and money. At present, $1.5 trillion in federal spending is distributed to states and local governments every year on the basis of data gathered by the Census Bureau. I am a demographer who has been teaching about the nation’s population trends since the early 1960s. I have analyzed census data for decades. In Census 2000, I was an enumerator and Census 2010, an address lister.

The 2020 census asks just seven questions. Back in 1910, the census posed 32 questions, with an additional array of questions for farmers. One of those queries asked farmers the value of the products they sold during the previous year. Since 1790, the official census start date had been either the first Monday of August or June 1. But, for the 1920 census, the Department of Agriculture presumed it would obtain more accurate information about the value of crops if the census were taken on January 1. It feared farmers would forget financial details over the winter. Congress approved the change without realizing the implications.

American Consequences

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