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by CameronNemo 1887 days ago
Yeah this is such a cluster. Makes you think that maybe we should not be doing point in time counts every ten years. That can have a huge impact on entire generations of people. American Community Surveys run far more often, showing that we can potentially change our ways.
2 comments
danso 1887 days ago
Sure, but (ignoring the Constitutional decennial mandate, which also requires Census subjects to be defined 3 years before the actual counting [0]) what's a cost-effective alternative? The budget for the 2020 Census was $7+ billion [1].

And while the ACS annual surveys are considered accurate, what would be the right period for changing Congressional seat counts? It obviously can't be annual (since House terms are every 2 years).

[0] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/abo...

[1] https://www.census.gov/about/budget.html

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xnx 1887 days ago
It's also astounding that this is the standard method when Apple/Google/Facebook/AT&T/Verizon could trivially give an instantaneous and probably more accurate count.
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danso 1887 days ago
None of those companies are likely to uniformly count all of the things that the Census purports to do, such as race/ethnicity and housing status.
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