The Census Bureau is slick. It has figured out a way to increase the percentage of households that respond to its surveys. How? It will make less of an effort to question families in areas where cooperation is historically lacking. And that usually means skipping poor households and bad neighborhoods. And that also means bypassing people who are more likely to be unemployed. A few years ago, I caught census workers jacking up their response rates the old-fashioned way: They’d fill out surveys themselves. The fraud was widespread, with people in all six census regions doing it. When my investigation put the kibosh on that kind of nonsense, the response rates for census surveys plummeted. And...
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