Will This Years Census Be the Last? – The New Yorker

Count all people, including babies, the U.S.Census Bureau instructs Americans on the questionnaire that will be mailed to every household by April 1, 2020, April Fools Day, which also happens to be National Census Day (and has been since 1930). You can answer the door; you can answer by mail; for the first time, you can answer online.

People have been counting people for thousands of years. Count everyone, beginning with babies who have teeth, decreed census-takers in China in the first millennium B.C.E., under the Zhou dynasty. Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls, God commands Moses in the Book of Numbers, describing a census, taken around 1500 B.C.E., that counted only men twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israelthat is, potential conscripts.

Ancient rulers took censuses to measure and gather their strength: to muster armies and levy taxes. Who got counted depended on the purpose of the census. In the United States, which counts the whole number of persons in each state, the chief purpose of the census is to apportion representation in Congress. In 2018, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross sought to add a question to the 2020 U.S. census that would have read, Is this person a citizen of the United States? Ross is a banker who specialized in bankruptcy before joining the Trump Administration; earlier, he had handled cases involving the insolvency of Donald Trumps casinos. The Census Bureau objected to the question Ross proposed. Eighteen states, the District of Columbia, fifteen cities and counties, the United Conference of Mayors, and a coalition of non-governmental organizations filed a lawsuit, alleging that the question violated the Constitution.

Last year, United States District Court Judge Jesse Furman, in an opinion for the Southern District, found Rosss attempt to add the citizenship question to be not only unlawful, and quite possibly unconstitutional, but also, given the way Ross went about trying to get it added to the census, an abuse of power. Furman wrote, To conclude otherwise and let Secretary Rosss decision stand would undermine the propositioncentral to the rule of lawthat ours is a government of laws, and not of men. There is, therefore, no citizenship question on the 2020 census.

All this, though, may be by the bye, because the census, like most other institutions of democratic government, is under threat. Google and Facebook, after all, know a lot more about you, and about the population of the United States, or any other state, than does the U.S.Census Bureau or any national census agency. This year may be the last time that a census is taken door by door, form by form, or even click by click.

Until ten thousand years ago, only about ten million men, women, and children lived on the entire planet, and any given person had only ever met a few dozen. (One theory holds that this is why some very old languages have no word for numbers.) No one could count any sizable group of people until human populations began to cluster together and to fall under the authority of powerful governments. Taking a census required administrative skills, coercive force, and fiscal resources, which is why the first reliable censuses were taken by Chinese emperors and Roman emperors, as the economist Andrew Whitby explains in The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age.

Censuses abound in the Bible, including one ordered by the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus and overseen by Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria. And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed, according to the Gospel of Luke. This census first took place while Quirinius was governing Syria. Everyone was supposed to register in the place of his or her birth. That, supposedly, was why Joseph made the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. (Quirinius census of Judea actually took place years later, but its a good story.)

The first modern censusone that counted everyone, not just men of fighting age or taxpayers, and noted all their names and agesdates to 1703, and was taken in Iceland, where astonishingly accurate census-takers counted 50,366 people. (They missed only one farm.) The modern census is a function of the modern state, and also of the scientific revolution. Modern demography began with the study of births and deaths recorded in parish registers and bills of mortality. The Englishman John Graunt, extrapolating from these records in the mid-seventeenth century, worked out the population of London, thereby founding the field that his contemporary William Petty called political arithmetic. Another way to do this is to take a census. In 1753, Parliament considered a bill for taking and registering an annual Account of the total number of people in order to ascertain the collective strength of the nation. This measure was almost single-handedly defeated by the parliamentarian William Thornton of York, who asked, Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased? He argued that a census would reveal to Englands enemies the very information England sought to conceal: the size and distribution of its population. Also, it violated liberty. If any officer, by whatever authority, should demand of me an account of the number and circumstance of my family, I would refuse it, he announced.

Two years later, in Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin published Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. Franklin had every reason to want to count the people in Britains North American colonies. He calculated that they numbered about a million, roughly the population of Scotland, which had forty-five members in the House of Commons and sixteen peers in the House of Lords. How many had the Americans? None.

To make this matter of representation mathematical, enumeration of the people, every ten years, is mandated by the U.S.Constitution. There would be no more than one member of Congress for every thirty thousand people. The Constitution also mandates that any direct tax levied on the states must be proportional to population. The federal government hardly ever levies taxes directly, though. Instead, its more likely to provide money and services to the states, and these, too, are almost always allocated in proportion to population. So the accuracy of the census has huge implications. Wilbur Rosss proposed citizenship question, which was expected to reduce the response rate in congressional districts with large numbers of immigrants, would have reduced the size of the congressional delegations from those districts, and choked off services to them.

Under the terms of the Constitution, everyone in the United States was to be counted, except Indians not taxed (a phrase that both excluded Native peoples from U.S. citizenship and served as a de-facto acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Native nations). Every person would be counted, and there were three kinds: free persons; persons bound to service for a term of years; and all other persons, the last a sorry euphemism for enslaved people, who were to be counted as three-fifths of a free person. It was a compromise between Northern delegates (who didnt want to count them at all, to thwart the South from gaining additional seats in Congress) and Southern delegates (who wanted to count them, for the sake of those seats)a compromise, that is, between zero and one.