Reasons You Should Care a Lot About the 2. Census. Do you care about the 2. You should. We all probably should care more about the 2. John Thompson, the director of the Census Bureau and the man in charge of running the 2. Its hard to overstate what huge news this is, and yet the story isnt getting a ton of attentionpossibly because theres a lot of other huge news too, and, well, the human brain can handle only so much. Doing your best to stay up with current events can often feel like drowning in a torrent of neverRead more Read. Losing the director of the Census Bureau at this stage of the game is a big deal, because a leaderless Census Bureau means a possibly not especially accurate census in 2. American life. Thompsons stepping down might not be such a big deal if we had an administration that was prioritizing a fair and accurate censusbut it looks like the White House has its hands full with other stuff, to put it mildly. To get an idea of what Thompsons departure means, I spoke to Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the Census Bureau and the current Carnegie Professor of Public Affairs and the Vice President for Global Centers at Columbia University, about why we should care. THE TOP 35 MEDIUMSIZED UNDERGRADUATE SCHEMES 20162017 The Top 35 Mediumsized Undergraduate Schemes table is based on reviews submitted by students on. Create free online surveys in minutes with SurveyMonkey. Get the feedback you need so you can make smarter decisions. Which, okay, it makes sense If software is constantly getting features that normally would have warranted a new version and additional money than the company. A mysterious Sponsored Content optout setting recently appeared in Spotify, and now the streaming giant has confirmed to TechCrunch what its about. And more important, why everyone should care, because it would be too easy to let this story disappear in the maelstrom of the current news cycle. Literally every American social program uses census numbers to allocate resources. Your fire department, your schoolsthe data gathered in the decadal census, determines, for example, whether new schools are opened or current schools are shut down. Transportation grants and education grants, among others, are distributed proportionally. If the Veterans Administration wants to place a hospital for elderly veterans, they obviously want to select a location heavily populated by elderly veterans. If the numbers are off, the hospital gets mis sitedand the vets dont get health care. If you have phone phobia, youre not alone. Im a recovering member of the club myself. If theRead more Read. Prewitt continues, Or take emergency relief. After every census, fire departments recalibrate their entire system of emergency relief where have people moved, whats the age structure, do they have telephones, are they elderly, do they live alone All of that is stuff that gets absorbed by fire departments, so when they get an emergencytheres a flood, theres a tornadothey know where the people are who have to be rescued. If theyre wrong, they dont find people. If you want your community to have the services it needs, your neighbors need to be counted. If youre trying to govern a society and respond to citizen needs, youve got to know who they are, what their conditions are, and where they are, says Prewitt. Running an accurate census takes money. Thompson stepped down amidst budget disputes. Prewitt tells me, Right now they are underfunded. The recent cyber attack on computers worldwide is just the latest wakeup call to the future we are blindly building for ourselves. Working with headphones on usually means youd rather not be bothered, but sometimes it means youre just listening to something while you work. If you want to be. The other thing that is seriously underfunded right now is the census advertising campaign, which was handled by professionals for the first time in 2. Its very sophisticated stuff. Manual De Aire Acondicionado Portatil General Plus. To ensure an accurate census, you need to open field offices, run outreach efforts, and hire a huge temporary workforce. Not enough money means not enough workers to conduct the census, and that means people will be undercounted. New Autodesk Impression 3 Full Version 2017 - Reviews' title='New Autodesk Impression 3 Full Version 2017 - Reviews' />People who are undercounted are invisible. Installing East Asian Language Pack. Fair representation hinges on a fair census. The census determines how the 4. House are allocated among the states. Every decade the population goes up in some states and down in others, and reps are redistributed accordingly. As Prewitt notes in this recent interview in the Washington Post, Repeated reallocation is fundamental to the fairness of our representative democracy. You need a director who knows what theyre doing. If a new, qualified director isnt ready to step in on July 1, even on an acting basis, other staffers will start to leave for other jobs. There will be a morale problem, and there will be people who will have job opportunities who will go someplace else. Especially the high powered math statisticians. They love the census because it is a big deal, says Prewitt. A skeleton crew is not going to get a good count. Everyone wants a good census. This is a bipartisan issue. Everyone wants their neighborhood and state counted and wants accurate numbers fire departments and schools want adequate counts retailers want accurate estimates of residents before investing in a given community. Prewitt notes The business community wants good numbers. They dont want to mis locate a Wal Mart because they misunderstood the population base. In some respects the commercial sector is one of the best defenders of a quality census. Of every 1. Americans, 4. But that varies depending on Read more Read. But one could put ones finger on the scale, either deliberately or through underfunding. Black Americans have historically been undercounted in the census Prewitt also identifies hard to count communities the poor, the non English speaking, immigrants, people who are suspicious of the government. It takes a big effort to find and count those people, and that effort takes money and an organized staff. In fairly quiet ways, small ways, you can selectively undercount. You do it by where you spend your advertising dollar. You do it by where you put your best staff. You do it by where you open up offices. Prewitt stresses that hes not implying that anyone in the current administration is angling for selectively undercounting, but that even ordinary bureaucratic problems, like lack of funding or disorganization, can really foul things up. Vigilance is important. The time to take action is now. Planning, testing, and advertising efforts need to get underway now. Prewitt tells me that these two or three years leading to the census are every bit as important as the census itself. You cant postpone the censusits constitutionally mandated to occur every ten years whether were ready or not. And you cant re do a botched census. Community groups may scream, mayors may say, hey, we have a lot more people than that here, but whats done is done. Which means we need to talk to our reps and our other community leaders now. I dont know how you get the average citizen to pay attention to it until its too late. Thats the really scary thing, warns Prewitt. So do something. Start by talking to your mayors office, the chamber of commerce, churches and community groups, and veterans groups in your area. If it seems like no ones doing anything, or they say the census is three years from now, who cares, start a movement yourself in your community. Pressure your reps to care. Prewitt says if he were trying to mobilize people, he would frame it this way I would say that President Trump can have a huge census. He can have a bigger census than Obamas census in 2. Clintons census in 2. Indeed a bigger census than George Washingtons in 1. The president of the United States can have the biggest and best census ever conducted. Trump likes big numbers, and he likes big numbers he believes hes responsible for. He can actually be responsible for the biggest and best census ever done. Got it Somebody start a hashtag. You dont need to wait four years before you get your next say in how the government is run.