The ax, not surprisingly, is wielded by big-government foes who argue that the decennial descent into demography is not only too intrusive but too expensive- at more than $4 billion. What’s surprising is who’s defending the census: big business. Companies use census data to make all manner of decisions. Real-estate developers rely on the number-of-bedrooms question to determine what size homes to build in a community. Department stores use data on working mothers to decide how to stock their shelves. This kind of detail is priceless. And with the government collecting it, it’s also free. The prospect of losing this marketing-rich information has panicked corporate America. “If the current contention about the census continues,” says Joan Naymark, director of research and planning for Dayton Hudson stores, “we’re in a great deal of trouble.”
No one is suggesting the census be abolished altogether-except, perhaps, those rabid antigovernment types who want the federal government abolished along with it. The seven-question “short form,” received by five out of every six households, is safe, in part because laws require the government to collect the most basic information about age, gender and race. It’s the so-called “long form” that faces extinction. The Census Bureau created it in 1940, after Congress asked for more information about employment, housing and income to assess the impact of the Depression. But the long form kept getting longer. The three newest questions, about grandparents acting as care-givers, will be added in 2000 as a requirement of the Welfare Reform Bill. The government estimated that the unlucky families who received the long form in 1990 needed 48 minutes to complete it. The short form took about 14 minutes.
But corporate America isn’t about to let a few extra minutes around the dining-room table get in the way of profits. They’ve already saved the long form once. In May, when a budget bill threatened to cut off funding-the long form cost as much as $800 million to produce in 1990-lobbyists from Sears, JCPenney, the May company and Other retail giants unleashed their army of lobbyists. The bill was rewritten. But the business community knows it has to tread lightly. If it makes the more detailed census data seem too important, people will wonder why corporations don’t pay for it,
Some census opponents want to reduce the burden and expense of the long form by separating it from the decennial census. While the short form would be sent out in April 2000, the long form would be administered up to a year later to a potentially smaller sampling of households. Or perhaps Something called the American Communities Survey will replace the long form, maybe by 2010. The survey, also administered by the Census Bureau and already being tested in a handful of communities, covers much of the territory of the long form. It would be administered on a rolling basis, which would provide more up-to-date information than the current census. Census supporters fear it will be under-funded and ultimately abandoned. And then the world would never know how much mobile-home residents who leave for work before 9 a.m. spend on electricity every month.
