alt Hacker NewsPretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.
I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted to match outcomes more rapidly than otherwise.
I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity - they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them. But as our relative strength wanes, our ability to overcome these forces of inertia does as well. And then our governments become less capable and eventually life starts getting worse.
We don’t need house-level data immediately (except perhaps in order to place census blocks within their appropriate congressional district etc). But there are aggregation units above which we should be using as good information as we possibly could be.
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This does nothing to make government less powerful.
It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.
I’d be more interested in giving my state detailed info, letting them run programs. The country can have aggregate data.
> In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization.
That ideal became tantamount to enabling genocide when the US government breached the confidentiality of the census in order to prison camp the japanese on the basis of their race.
> I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity
It's not even just a question of "all". The state should have the absolute minimum capacity to carry out its necessary tasks. Collecting race (just to give one example of many) of any form is not absolutely necessary and so it should not be done.
> they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them
Because they may be in the future. -- but even that is too strong, the greatest harm perpetrated by state actors has consistently come from trying to "help" rather than intentionally malicious acts.
But this article is about a decision to damage the census less. If you value an accurate census, you should be celebrating!
> I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure.
Intentionally damaging infrastructure is the recurring theme of this administration.