{"id":70191,"date":"2012-05-22T21:13:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T05:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=16782"},"modified":"2012-05-22T21:13:25","modified_gmt":"2012-05-23T05:13:25","slug":"the-american-community-survey-mend-it-dont-end-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/05\/22\/the-american-community-survey-mend-it-dont-end-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The American Community Survey: mend it, don\u2019t end it!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To my surprise there is apparently a move on the part of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtontimes.com\/news\/2012\/may\/20\/census-surveys-arent-down-for-the-count\/\">Republicans in the House of Representatives<\/a> to curtail funding for <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/American_Community_Survey\">The American Community Survey<\/a>. I am not too excited by the idea that you could get fined for not filling out a government survey form, but neither do I think that abolishing social statistics is the correct solution to this problem. <strong>Rather, better surveys which compensate for biases in response rates are the direction we need to go.<\/strong> The reality is that a government of our scope and continuing responsibilities needs the best social statistics that money can buy. I understand that many believe that some of the functions of our government are illegitimate or unwarranted, but destroying the government&#8217;s general ability to function is counter-productive unless you want to total social collapse to trigger a revolution.<\/p>\n<p>Second, <b>government data collection is a public good with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Externality#Positive\">positive externalities<\/b>.<\/b> If we abolish endeavors such as the American Community Survey than social data will be the domain only of corporations, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/05\/22\/science\/big-data-troves-stay-forbidden-to-social-scientists.html?_r=2&#038;ref=science&#038;%23038;pagewanted=print\">who are not always keen on sharing that data<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/mENYmFAeDDc\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To my surprise there is apparently a move on the part of the Republicans in the House of Representatives to curtail funding for The American Community Survey. I am not too excited by the idea that you could get fined for not filling out a government su&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[281,2033],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-analysis","category-the-american-community-survey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70191"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70336,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70191\/revisions\/70336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}