Worrying About the Count
July 24, 2010 | 2 Comments
Concerns about the census just keep coming. We’ve seen people rail against Tony Clement. We’ve seen Mr. Clement flail around, trying to find a defense. Some small government types have been backing the decision to make the long form voluntary. We’ve had townhalls and twitter debates. And we’ve seen the resignation of the head census honcho, Munir Sheikh.
Maybe our only hope is this guy.
I really don’t won’t to get bogged down in this debate; my passions are not set ablaze by the topic. Nonetheless, I thought it worthwhile to go over a few the issues wrapped up in the whole controversy.
I’ll put my observations below the fold so that those of you who have no interest in the political mathematical complex need not be bothered. But hey, it’s nice to see the Count, ain’t it?
- First of all, Tony Clement is wrong about the math. Now, I don’t have a degree in mathematics, but I have enough of an understanding of statistics to know that turning the long form into a voluntary exercise is just going to breed selection bias. Mr. Clement’s defense that they’ll just send out more forms does not address the problem. It might be a good idea expand the sample size, but that’s not the debate. So far, Neither Tony Clement, nor any other Tory, has put forth an argument based in mathematics for a voluntary survey.
- Per Ezra Levant, Mr. Sheikh’s resignation is, at least in part, political grandstanding… with some reputation damage control thrown in for good measure. Look, this is not some sudden decision. I am going to assume that Mr. Sheikh has been doing his job, in which case, he has known for a while that the 2011 census would be embracing innumeracy. To resign after controversy erupts is not the mark of a completely principled stance. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt; he probably didn’t like the decision, but was willing to soldier on try to make the best of a bad situation. Bureaucrats shouldn’t make the rules, so they may, on occasion, have to do something that they’d rather not. However, once the controversy hit, he had no real choice but to step down… assuming he wanted to keep any shred of professional dignity. Sure, he didn’t act perfectly in all of this; he just acted human. As such, he deserves no scorn or praise.
- I’m inclined to believe Mr. Clement when he claims that the utility of a voluntary long form was confirmed by someone at StatsCan. I’m just inclined to believe that rather than being told, “you could make the long form voluntary,” Mr. Clement was told, “well… you could make the long form voluntary…” If I’m right, then both Tony Clement and StatsCan are to blame. Mr. Clement’s advisors at StatsCan should not have made a suggestion of the viability of a voluntary long form unless there was corporate confidence that such an action would still maintain the quality and the integrity of census data. If you’re going to make a suggestion to your boss, you need to be able to stand behind it if it is acted upon. However, if Mr. Clement received a caveat-laden suggestion about a voluntary long form, he should have had the wisdom to suss out that the representatives of StatsCan didn’t really support the idea.
- A desire for data integrity does not automatically make concerns about privacy moot. Nor does the argument that everyone’s data is collected and stored anonymously. Anonymity is not a synonym for privacy. Further, it does not change the fact that government coerces people, with the threat of fines and jail time, to relinquish their private information. The employment of a voluntary long form is, perhaps, moronic, but it is no more moronic than half the questions on the long form are intrusive. And it’s no more moronic than compelling people by force to answer these questions is illiberal.
- The small government/starve the beast argument – that we need to nix the long form lest a bunch of scary social engineers ruin the country – holds no water. The census is not our first step as we slouch towards 1984. Further, census data can be used to kill government programs. Anyway, politicians don’t need census data to put forth deeply interventionist political platforms. Why would we think that these “social engineers” will abandon their nefarious plots should the census be ditched.
- There is a difference between a libertarian argument and a small government argument. This is really just a little peccadillo to me, but a robust libertarian argument would object not only to the abuse of data by politicians looking to trample freedom, but it would also object to the census because it, in and of itself, tramples freedom. Further, a libertarian argument need not call for the abolition of the census, just the elimination of the particularly intrusive questions.
- Following on that point, the Conservative government is not a champion of liberty or freedom. It’s a little rich for them to suddenly get their classical liberalism on when it comes to the census, but revert back to their old ways when it comes to, say, torture or police brutality.
- That being said, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the Tories having an ideological reason for restricting or eliminating the census. Though the defenders of a mandatory census have mathematics on their side, the desire to have accurate data about the population is also ideological. The dishonesty and innumeracy of the Tory initiative is distasteful, but Conservatives would not be in the wrong for wanting to get rid of the census. That’s just political debate.
My biggest beef with this whole matter is that we’re getting a lot of one way hash arguments, straw men, weak men and refusals (by action if not be word) to actually engage the other side in debate. Mandatory census forms are an affront to free society. Useful data can be helpful in ensuring good and efficient governance. Taking one side in the debate does not oblige you to wave off the concerns of others. As with many political decisions (and, yes, having a census is inherently political, even if those using the data won’t use it for political purposes), we have to balance competing interests. We have to acknowledge that life isn’t perfect and we have to try to cope with those imperfections. Good faith and honest intellectual investigation are the best ways to do that. Right now, I don’t see a whole lot of that in the census debate.
p.s. After I wrote this post, I found this article in which a journalist goes through the 2006 long form census to judge its intrusiveness and degree of burden. I wouldn’t recommend reading it. It’s of little insight, a little deception and, anyway, are we really going to use anecdote to judge the value of the census? That’d actually be an argument against the census, regardless of the findings.
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2 Responses to “Worrying About the Count”
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July 24th, 2010 @ 10:08 pm
It’s true. There’s a lot of rhetoric in this debate and really entrenched sides, when really it’s more of a political issue about how much intrusion of privacy is tolerable to get good stats?
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July 25th, 2010 @ 8:00 am
Worrying About the Count…
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