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Friday, February 16, 2001
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The Good Census
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The Congressional Members of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board congratulate the Census Bureau on the dramatic improvement in reducing the differential undercount of infants, children, immigrants, and members of minority communities in the 2000 decennial census.
Census 2000 is a success due to many reasons including:
- Congress appropriated nearly $7 billion to fund Census 2000 programs.
- A $187 million first-ever national advertising campaign increased census awareness.
- More than 140,000 local, state and national public/private partnerships were formed to promote census participation.
- The Census in the Schools program raised awareness of this important civic duty among millions of students and parents across the nation.
- A 67 percent mail response rate allowed more funds to be directed to finding the hard-to-count populations traditionally missed in the census.
The improved accuracy of Census 2000 greatly reduces the potential need to statistically adjust the data. Even experts acknowledge that this process has flaws that can produce less accurate data than the Bureau now possess.
One such expert is Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, who wrote a commentary entitled "Census Sampling Is Dangerous" that appeared recently in the Wall Street Journal. To read the article, click here:
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