How accountability dies and bureaucracy swells
The United States Census Bureau misestimated Boston’s population in 2005 by more than 6%, a margin of error that doesn’t inspire much confidence in the Bureau. There are unanswered questions about the revision, but certainly the consensus right now is that the revision is correct and previous estimates were wrong.
Given that, one might expect there would be a call for the Bureau to either improve its estimation techniques or perhaps a demand that funding for the agency would be cut. One might, in other words, expect a demand for accountability.
Instead two representatives from Metropolitan Area Planning Council argue in an op-ed in the Boston Globe that Massachusetts taxpayers, who are already paying their share of the Bureau’s costs, should cough up more money in order to do what the Census Bureau should be doing. Here’s what Marc Dreisen and Holly St. Clair write:
Last year, the Legislature appropriated Secretary of State William Galvin $100,000 for a population projection program at the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute. That was a step in the right direction, but a tiny one. Actually, $800,000 is needed — a modest sum compared with all the federal funding we could lose if we are undercounted, not to mention the value of a lost member of Congress
I for one really have no interest in paying more just to save a bunch of hack jobs. There is also no reason to worry about the number of Congressmen from Massachusetts, as those are decided based on the population count that’s done every ten years and not the annual population estimate. If there are reasons to believe the count is substantially off-mark, then we should fix that through the Census Bureau, not by creating our own people counting agency.
It’s worth noticing, by the way, that the Donahue Institute once again turns its mission, “to connect the Commonwealth with the resources of the University,” on its head and instead connects the University with the resources of the Commonwealth.
