Stephen E. Fienberg
Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics & Social Science
Acting Director of the Center for Automated Learning & Discovery
Carnegie Mellon University
Friday, March 31
2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A-1100
Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America
Every 10 years, the federal government counts the population, reapportions
Congress and uses the population data to plug new numbers in funding formulas
for government programs. States and local legislatures also use counts to
redraw boundaries and for planning. Census taking is usually one of the least
newsworthy of federal government activities, except perhaps for the month or
two of intense activity around the April census date. This decade, however,
plans for taking the 2000 Census have been front page news. The tangled
political and technical issues have provided a flood of news and media
coverage, much of it confusing rather than enlightening. Myths on census
taking and the role of sampling abound. Congress, the President, and the
Supreme Court have all weighed in on the issue, to the dismay of the career
officials of the Census Bureau who conduct the census. What is an "actual
enumeration"? What would it mean to have two sets of data for all 7 million
census blocks in the country? And how, in the current closely divided
partisan environment of Washington, will the issues be resolved?
This talk describes a series of myths about the U.S. decennial census and sets
the sampling and adjustment methods proposed for 2000 census in statistical,
political, and historical context. Making modern statistical methodology work
in such contexts will remain a challenge well beyond 2000.
For further information about this event, please contact
the UCI Center for Statistical Consulting
[949] 824-1680