Word: censuses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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State governments work through such a bewildering variety of finance systems -mostly vintage masterpieces of political patchwork-that the U.S. Census Bureau needs about eleven months to reckon a firm figure for the actual money spent by all states in any given year. Last week Census popped up with its tally on spending by states for fiscal 1957: a record $21,084,666,000, up 12% in the same year that federal expenditures (including state-run federal-aid programs) climbed only 4%. Since fiscal 1946, when legislatures set to work on the backlogged needs for schools and roads, hundreds...
Retail sales continued surprisingly strong. The Census Bureau estimated April sales at $16.3 billion, and a level 2.5% over March. But the ratio of sales to inventories was still considerably higher than a year ago, which meant that businessmen will probably continue to cut their inventories until the ratio finally gets back in line...
Nevertheless, the Census Bureau has already made changes that raise a doubt about this continuity. Many an economist has estimated that the current recession is worse than 1949-50 or 1953-54 because the unemployed percentages appear bigger. But the figures are not completely comparable, because both the definition and the sample have changed. Until last year, the census takers counted all workers laid off for 30 days or less as employed. Last year the rules were changed to count such workers as unemployed. In this fashion, the statisticians arbitrarily added another 250,000 to the unemployment totals. While...
More important, in trying to improve the accuracy of the sampling, the Census Bureau in the past 15 years has increased the number of families interviewed from 25,000 to 35,000 and the number of areas surveyed from 68 to 330. When it expanded from 68 to 230 areas in 1954, the bureau ran two surveys, one in the smaller number of areas and one in the bigger. To its surprise, it found a huge increase of 700,000 in the computations of jobless totals for the U.S. based on the larger survey. Since then, the number of areas...
Despite all improvements, even today's sampling methods are far from 100% accurate. The Census Bureau itself admits that the figures contain a standard error of plus or minus 120,000 at the current level. Thus no one knows within six figures precisely what the total number of unemployed workers in the U.S. really is. Therefore, such figures as a 25,000 increase or decrease in unemployment are meaningless. And so are the tortured, hairline analyses made from them...