HOW MUCH WILL WE SACRIFICE FOR ACCURACY IN THE CENSUS? April 2 660
words
The mail-in phase of the 2000 census officially wrapped up
Saturday, and in a week or so armies of enumerators will go from
door to weary door, trying to find and count the 40 percent or so
of Americans who didn't send it in.
They couldn't be bothered, or they objected to some intrusive
questions, or they don't want to be found and counted.
And some of them never will be found or counted. In 1990, it's
estimated, 1.58 percent were missed overall, which in a nation of
276 million people is the equivalent of missing the entire
population of Colorado.
So later still, a smaller army will conduct a statistical survey of
several hundred thousand people to determine how far off the census
was, and produce a second set of adjusted numbers.
The adjusted numbers can't be used to apportion congressional
seats, which is the Constitution's justification for having a
census, but may be used for other purposes, including redistricting
and the distribution of federal grants.
Such a process is inherently political, Peter Skerry argues in a
forthcoming book, "Counting on the Census: Race, Group Identity,
and the Evasion of Politics."
Advocates of adjusting the census, Skerry says, should specify what
degree of accuracy is acceptable.
"We might begin," he writes in a policy brief for the Brookings
Institution, "by asking whether there is such a thing as a
structural undercount, comparable to structural unemployment: a
level of undercount below which we cannot expect a free society to
go."
Skerry is an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna
College, and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, which
will publish the book April 14. The policy brief is available on
the Web at Brookings.edu (follow the Press Room link).
Two issues drive the debate over adjusting the census; one is that
minorities are undercounted at several times the rate of whites,
and the other is that the federal government hands out $185
billion, based, in part, on census figures.
But the fiscal stakes are actually much lower than they appear,
Skerry says. The congressional General Accounting Office found that
only $449 million of $136 billion (0.33 percent) would have been
distributed differently among the states if adjusted figures from
the 1990 census had been used for 15 big federal programs.
That's real money, of course, but compared with the total of all
state budgets, it's barely round-off error.
The fraught question of minority undercounts also has less
practical effect than the frenzied debate over it would suggest.
The political effects of adding more minorities to the census are
not easy to predict. A state or district may seem to increase its
population by correcting an undercount, and still lose ground to
some other jurisdiction where the correction was larger.
Redistricting after 1990 created a number of "minority-majority"
districts that were safely Democratic, while enhancing the election
prospects of Republicans nearby. In many districts where the
undercount is high, the voter turnout is low; correcting the former
does nothing to change the latter.
Republicans' reluctance to gamble on the consequences of adjusting
the census, Skerry notes, "hardly justifies the utter certainty
with which virtually all commentators assert that adjustments would
help Democrats and hurt Republicans."
Even defining race and ethnicity will grow more difficult. The
listing of "racial" categories on the 2000 census manages to be
both nonsensical and offensive. Maybe by the time 2010 rolls
around, we'll all have had our DNA mapped and we'll be able to tell
the Census Bureau exactly where on the planet each of our
chromosomes originated.
Failing that, however, group boundaries increasingly blur. People
do not always identify themselves the same way; one Census Bureau
study found a significant percentage of people who changed their
response between the 1990 census and a subsequent survey.
I've written before in favor of adjusting the census, but Skerry's
description of the problems certainly persuades me I should take
another look.
A small measure of inaccuracy may be better than the alternatives.