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Confidentiality Expires For 1940 Census Records
Hugh Pickens writes writes "In spring of 1940, the Census Bureau sent out more than 120,000 fact-gatherers, known as 'enumerators,' to survey the nation's 33 million homes and 7 million farms. Now as the 72 years of confidentiality expires, the National Archives website buckled under the load as the 1940 census records were released and 1.9 million users hit the archives servers in the first four hours the data went public and at one point, the Archives said, its computers were receiving 100,000 requests per second. Data miners will have the opportunity to pick and chip through more than 3.8 million digital images of census schedules, maps and other sociological minutiae. What will we learn from this mother lode? The pivotal year 1940 'marked the beginnings of a shift from a depressed peacetime to a prosperous wartime,' says David E. Kyvig, author of Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1939. The vast data dump, Kyvig says, will allow historians 'to look closely at particular communities and how people within them were doing in terms of employment, income and material comforts.' The 1940 census was the first Census that looked deeper into the details of much of American life. 'As we see how the country evolved over the subsequent 20 years, where we have aggregate census data ... we ought to be able to see more clearly how government spending bettered everyday life, confirmed Keynesian economic theory and revealed that, before the war, the New Deal did too little, rather than too much, to stimulate the U.S. economy.""
Get all 18TB of it while it's hot.
Just because the government was able to implement a Keynesian solution to that economic problem, does not mean that it holds the solution to every economic problem, for instance one that involves post - peak natural resource production.
OK it's somewhat sensitive information, but why was it confidential for so long?
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I have gathered that point, however there is more than one way to get rid of debt.
I think that is kind of tangential to what I was asking though. Keynes advocated "counter-cyclical" spending, correct? Inflate during recession and deflate during boom times (yes, people and businesses will default because of this policy). What we have instead is constant inflation.
I'm not claiming that all regulation is good. The examples you cite (regulating price of electricity, the TSA) are clear examples of stupid, counterproductive regulation.
My position is that without Federal law to suppress a host of discriminatory practices, the bigots would still be in charge. Without Federal law to prevent dioxin in the ground water, companies would still be dumping toxic waste. The quality of life we take for granted did not magically emerge as we all became enlightened. It required the big stick of government regulation to stop the elite from abusing the rest of the public.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
No, the reason for the 100,000 requests per second is largely - drumroll - mormons.
No, I'm not kidding. Honestly.
Part of their religion is that they hold baptisms for dead people, so they allegedly get a chance to become mormons after their death, and thus gain greater rewards[*]. In order to do that, they engage extensively in genealogy. Really extensively.
Their accuracy isn't much to brag about, though. I discovered through a search engine that someone in the LDS church had done a baptism "for" my departed father. And got most of his details wrong, including his birth year and family relations. But now it's "official" as far as they're concerned.
They refuse to strike this from their records - I am "welcome to" submit correct information, but I don't want them to have that either. How about they stick to their own, and leave the rest of us alone?
But yeah, mormons cause a huge part of the traffic.
[*]: Like being reunited with one's loved ones, or becoming a Mr. and Mrs. God of a new planet. No, I'm not making this up. Religion is stranger than fiction.
The main claim is that government often creates more problems than it solves, then gets stuck in a loop of never ending quick fixes each generating more unintended consequences.
Yes, that's the main claim by right-wing fools.
My wife can't make decent cacciatore, but that's no reason to never eat cacciatore.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If the central bank prints up 20 trillion dollars and it doesn't help anything, Krugman and his ilk simply shrug and says "Eh, must not have been enough."
No, Krugman says it wasn't spent correctly and yes, the $700B of the stimulus was half what he prescribed. Instead of being injected at the bottom of the economy (working folk and main street businesses), it was piled on to the top, where it was used to keep paying out bonuses to the very people that caused this mess in the first place.
When the financial industry makes up 40% of the economy, purely by shuffling paper and gambling, that's actually acting as a drag on the economy and not helping things. The TBTF banks should have been broken up *and* liquidity should have been aimed at jobs creation. Instead, you have a gov't that's heavily influenced (run?) by bankers and financiers who can't see any further than the edges of Manhattan. No idea how we're going to get out of this one, unless they go and dig a moat around New Yawk and stop listening to all the yammerheads over there.
I drank what? -- Socrates
But you can sit their in your smug, self-righteous libertarianism and keep pretending Krugman is a hack who hasn't consistently made very accurate predictions and the Nobel prize in economics is a fraud
Krugman has consitently failed to predict anything since he helped lead Enron into an abyss about 14 years ago. Almost eveything he espouses has been proven to be bunk in the wake of Greece, Spain and Portugal in Europe, and his claims of "not enough spending" on the failed Obama stimulus plans is the type of overly general crap that mean nothing. Typical Keynesian... "no matter how much we spend, it's never enough." Further, he has more than once taken obvious disengenuous positions about a true Nobel laureate, Milton Friedman. Seeing as how his sheep-like readership has never actually read Freidman, they'll never know.