Peter Sinclair: Census on the net? It figures

By PETER SINCLAIR

The quote ``There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics'' is attributed to both Benjamin Disraeli and Mark Twain, in a ratio of about 5 to 1.

Naturally, when you're speaking to our ranking expert in the third category, the devil makes you lob it at him.

You can tell it's a clay pigeon that Len Cook, the Government Statistician, has had to gun down more than once over the years. He pots it effortlessly. ``Some figures are more open to abuse than others,'' he says.

``It's a question of quality, almost like the difference between good food and junk food ...''

He pursues the analogy with enthusiasm, adding that his department is working on a formula to distinguish the statistical fibre from the fries, so to speak.

I called him after reading of the new option for completing the forms of America's Census 2000 online.

Conducted on the first of this month, indications are that the internet alternative, although limited by privacy considerations, has been a success.

The US Census Bureau's internet traffic climbed 142 per cent, from 230,500 unique visitors to 556,700 in census week.

Its pages have always been a useful web-source of demographic data, its excellent FactFinder presenting a distillation of everything it has ever learned or guessed about the ways American people live, love and die.

In preparation for the Great Quiz they created a new point of entry which included a feature for teachers and students, and a public forum on issues concerning the census and American Indians.

Help for filling the survey out was provided in Adobe's Portable Document Format with automatic download and installation of the appropriate Acrobat reader - no mean feat in such a polylingual society, even if the English version at least is pervaded by that fatal tedium which infects bureaucratic prose, ranging from the humble (``Unfortunately, due to technical limitations, not all census forms can be completed on the Net'') to the menacing (``Your response is required by law!'').

The decision to go to the Net has been forced on the bureau by some of its own statistics: in the American model, conducted once a decade, mail response has dwindled from 78 per cent of households in 1970, to 70 per cent in 1980, 65 per cent in 1990, and this year it's expected to tumble to 60 per cent.

Len Cook agrees with everything but the timing. He will preside over our next census on March 5 next year - not time enough, he says, to resolve privacy issues. He would be forced into what he sees as an unsatisfactory compromise.

Here he slips into Gov-speak, and uploads a torrent of phrases like ``collaborative development at governmental level,'' and ``secure document-delivery strategies'' by ``keeping abreast of the methodological systems in other countries''.

He cites Singapore as leading the field, but I seem to recall that authoritarian city-state has been - to put it tactfully - something less than scrupulous regarding the privacy of its citizens.

In April last year it secretly scanned all their personal computers, allegedly in a bid to catch hackers. Caught red-handed, the CEO of Singapore Telecom (80 per cent government-owned) asserted that it was for his customers' own good, and was providing ``a value-added service'' by inspecting their PCs for nothing.

Mr Cook, too, strikes a slightly totalitarian note when he says an online census here will have to wait for ``some unique national identifier ... a Government Service Number, whatever ...''

Something tattooed on one's arm, perhaps? In any event, he promises next year's will be the last of the great Victorian surveys, and by 2006, binary will have replaced ballpoint.

Meanwhile, he'll keep working on the department's extraordinarily fine website - after a redesign last December, hits increased from about 1000 a month to 340,00 this March - where he slices, dices and measures the nation as finely as he may, no doubt sustained and comforted by the words of Edmund Burke (1729-1797): ``He alone deserves to be remembered by his children who treasures and preserves the memory of his fathers.''

Related Links


Benjamin Disraeli

America's Census 2000

The US Census Bureau

Adobe Acrobat reader

Department of Statistics New Zealand