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So we need historians who can find a way to make their information interesting to young people. Departure of U. Census director threatens count. Science Jeffrey Mervis. John Thompson is stepping down next month as director of the U. Census Bureau. His announcement today comes less than 1 week after a congressional spending panel grilled him about mounting problems facing the agency in preparing for the decennial census.
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There are times I wish I had Arthur Levitt at home to reason with my kids. And then there is Vonnie Quinn, a British Irish? Often on radio, one wonders what the speaker looks like. When Vonnie Quinn speaks, one wonders what the speaker is wearing. Originally published December 29, at www. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. You have the measurement of settlement houses and the way people lived. So you begin to get the measurement of social phenomena as a way almost to shame the leadership into doing something about them.
Indeed, if you go back to the social reformers, both in Britain and in the United States in the Victorian period, you will find that they are some of the pioneers in using statistical information, what we would now call social indicators, to describe the condition of the society or the population that needed attention by the political leadership.
This convergence of the social reform movement and the growth of statistics is one of the things that kind of plants the idea that you can actually use statistical time series or social indicators to hold the government accountable for its performance. KENNETH PREWITT: When numbers are as important as they are to governance, both from the point of view of people trying to push their agendas to try to bring notice to their concerns, and indeed used by the government to try to govern the people, you do create a pressure if you would to kind of create numbers that are most satisfactory for this, that or the other political outcome.
I think one of the things that certainly happened in American society is the increased use of statistics to argue political points. And therefore what you find is you find people on both sides of a partisan argument trying to use data or statistics to say, "Look, I can prove that with my data that welfare reform is working or not working, that deterrence of crime is working or not working. I think what's really healthy about that is the data least puts boundaries to that debate.
You now are arguing about the quality of the information available to you and the inferences you can draw from it. And that's much, much better, I think, than having partisan arguments just about anecdotes, which is the alternative.
So at least you would hope that political debate gets a little more reasonable, because you have now put some boundaries around what can be claimed or not claimed.
And I think that is a development forward for our democracy. What you have to guard against is the deliberate misuse of the data. It's been said, of course - John Adams said it - that facts are stubborn things. I think you can get a picture of a society in only two ways really, the stories the society tells about itself - its fiction, it poetry, its narrative if you will.
And the other way you learn about a society is by its statistical measures of it. And I don't mean to discredit the stories, but the stories very often just become excuses for making political points.
But at least the statistics have to be taken into account. What some people do not realize is that the Census did its task every year from to And after the Census we did not reapportion for the first time in history.
Now, why did we not reapportion on the basis of the Census? It's because there had been a strong population movement from the rural South to the Northern industrial cities during the First World War period.
And when the rural conservative Congress in saw those data, they did not want to reapportion. Now, one of the reasons they did not want to reapportion is because the cities, the Northern industrial cities, were politically radical. The new immigrant groups from Europe who had come into those cities were after all voting left, or bringing in alien socialist ideas.
This was the period of the Palmer raids, of an anti-immigration movement in this country. That converged with the Census data that said not only that - there's a lot of internal mobility in this country - is moving workers from the rural South up to the Northern industrial cities.
And the Congress simply said we are not going to reapportion. We don't want to see power move from our areas to those radical areas of the country. And so they refused to reapportion, and we did not reapportion until after the Census. In , or following the Census, the U.
Congress actually set aside its constitutional obligation to reapportion. It argued about the data, it argued about the formula. And not until after the Census did it reapportion.
One of the things that happened, by the way, in this period - up until every time the population had grown we had expanded the size of the House of Representatives. So it wasn't allocating just a fixed pie, it was expanding the pie. After the Census, really with the introduction of I think Arizona and New Mexico were the two new states brought into the Union at that time - it was decided to fix the size of the House of Representatives - do not allow it to grow beyond So was the first decennial where the Congress was faced with the problem of reapportioning the House of Representatives and not being able to expand the size of the House.
And that contributed to their reluctance to see powers shift from the rural South to the Northern industrial cities. KENNETH PREWITT: One of the really important developments in the s was the gradual emergence of scientific sampling theory; that is, the idea that you could talk to or get information from a small segment of a population and reliably estimate the characteristics of the entire population. This was a new notion really in population sampling.
Of course sampling had occurred before for other purposes, but in terms of population sampling it really begins to emerge in the s, largely at the Census Bureau. Some of the leading statisticians of the time. But of course it was immediately picked up by some of the private sector organizations, like the Gallup organization, which wanted to use this new technology to really begin to do public opinion surveys.
The Census Bureau of course itself was not interested in public opinion surveys; that's not what its job was. It first used sampling in the Census to create what we now call the long form; that is, we for the first time in the Census Bureau separated what as few a number of questions - i. And they could only do that if they had the confidence that by putting it out to only, say, one out of five or one out of six of the households they could estimate the characteristics of the entire population and its housing characteristics.
So that was the first big use of sampling theory by the Census Bureau in In the meantime, of course, you begin to get to get the emergence of a public opinion industry with George Gallup of course being one of the pioneers. Academic pioneer at this time was the National Opinion Research Center then based at the University of Chicago, which was founded in by Henry Field and his colleagues.
One of the really tough questions in democratic theory of course is to what extent is a political representative supposed to kind of use his best judgment in making laws or simply reflect the wishes and preferences of the people who put them there? It even goes back to the Constitution - the whole idea of creating a republican form of government is that you would take the kind of untutored distribution of wishes and preferences and judgments of the American population, you'd filter them through this group of representatives who were after all supposed to be wiser, more intelligent, more judgmental.
So this is a tough question, to what extent do you want a democracy that's based in effect upon simply the momentary preferences of the population. Public opinion polling sort of enters this debate in a very complicated way, because it's the first time that you can rather systematically get a judgment of what a whole population feels or wants, what its priorities are, how much it weighs this versus that social policy or social good. Carried to an extreme, of course you get referendum politics.
You simply put the substantive issue on the ballot, as we do in California - other states as well, but primarily in California - and then let the population vote on their judgment - on affirmative action, or immigration policy, or taxation policy, housing policy. And that was to produce a massive study called Recent Social Trends. And dozens and dozens of American social scientists participated in this effort, and it was to try to document everything that was going around in the population and housing characteristics as best as we could at that time.
The irony was that the book was finished after Hoover had left the White House and given to Franklin Roosevelt, who didn't particularly want to be bound by some effort that a previous president had initiated. And so a lot of the ideas in Recent Social Trends - a lot of the documentation of housing conditions, migration patterns, family structure, crime, poverty, unemployment - actually found their way into the policies in the New Deal legislation - not because the book itself was attended to, but because the people who had actually been writing it became advisors to the administration in the s to work our way out of the Depression.
In some respects, though Hoover was himself a president who appreciated the importance of measuring and documenting social conditions, it really was FDR who made the most use of the social sciences. The social sciences were pretty prevalent in the First World War period, but briefly and momentarily. But not until really the FDR period do you institutionalize kind of a role for the kind of intelligence that social science can bring to the governing process. And you do that with economic advisors and social advisors.
And gradually as you expand the federal responsibilities for social welfare and state of the economy, you find yourself in need of the social sciences. Look, we take a sample of our blood to judge - make an estimate, a medical estimate about the quality of our blood, whether we are carrying diseases or not. So that's sampling theory. Or if you are doing quality control on an assembly line, you don't sort of check every Coke bottle; you check every one-hundredth Coke bottle to make sure that the recipe worked just right.
So we use sampling all the time in order to kind of function. We can't sort of look at the entire population constantly; we look at a small part of that population.
Now, sampling a human population as against Coke bottles or blood is actually harder. The more heterogeneous the population that you need to make a judgment about, the harder it is to draw the perfect sample to estimate it.
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