Democracy's Data by Dan Bouk
There are stories in statistics—and stories behind them, too. That’s the gist of Democracy’s Data, focused on the stats gathered by the 1940 census, America’s most recent headcount whose detailed responses have been disclosed (census data remains secret by law for 72 years). Dan Bouk describes himself as a historian “of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness.” With similar wit, he punctures the “aura of objectivity” surrounding statistics, and questions whether you can really fit “the unruly reality of your life within the [census] form’s straight-ruled lines”—or for that matter, any form that asks us whether we are white or black or this or that.
Democracy’s Data closely examines the people who decided what would be asked of Americans on the 1940 census. It was a committee representing various special interests, its members all white and mostly male. And yes, the questions are always as important as the answers. The author reminds us of Trump’s attempt to ask Americans if they were citizens in a naked move to undercount (or intimidate) portions of the Latino population.
