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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 -
Someone gonna torrent that?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
This is called "The Broken Window Fallacy", but is essentially a cornerstone of alot of economic policy, because rebuilding things (that were destroyed) creates jobs. In fact I hear alot about 'creating jobs', for example recent talks in my state for a casino, even though its a negative sum game. Even part of our throw away culture is defined by the measurement of GDP for economic success, since the sale of a single part contributes less than the sale of a whole new device. Now its no surprise that warfare, exploitation of and shipping resources around the world, may have not been the most efficient use of our time. But I have a belief that had the greedy capitalist pigs, not gone to war to protect their 'private property' from the 'communist looters', we would have ended up with a more 'free market' than we have now. Furthermore the more homogeneous development and lower diminished returns on both natural and human capital, would have increased aggregate human development and economic productivity, and probably have reduced the population and factored resource inefficiencies.
America has a god given right to demand a bigger piece of the pie, even if that means destroying some of it in the process, because were exceptional and gods chosen people. Which is essentially our 19th and early 20th century intellectual rhetoric, we found what was essentially virgin land that we exploited, in order to create our version of order in the world.
I believe that government has a role to play in the economy, but not one that is in bed with the private sector, which is where most of the waste is derived from. However if your talking about it from a liberty perspective, there is essentially two forms of liberty (actually a plurality), the government and private sector both advocate differing varieties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty#Freedom_as_a_triadic_relation
Technically speaking all money is now a form of debt, and what governments tend to do anymore is issue debt in their currency, and then inflate the currency to keep the debt/gdp level low enough to prevent default.
Its mathematically impossible for everyone to pay off all debt in the system that we currently have now, the inflation is what makes the active pursuit of money (and therefore production) obligatory.
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.
All of the above and more are from the postwar period. I don't think you can have it both ways: 2012 respect for civil rights is only possible through 2012 regulation. One could say the same about clean water, food safety, highway safety, and other important issues.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Pretty much. But people forget today that Keynes was specifically addressing the problems of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The world is so different now that it's by no means certain that Keynes himself would advocate the same solution for the current recession. I therefore tend to tune out anyone condemning a policy on the basis it's "Keynesian".
This is called "The Broken Window Fallacy",
Actually there's a difference since War may involve killing lots of people.
If the number of people goes down but the amount of assets and resources don't go down as much, it means the survivors/victors have more.
This theory assumes infinite resources. Reality is a polar opposite, as European nations discovered after WW2. The continent was literally plundered of natural resources that were strip-mined to fuel war machines.
No, he doesn't. He's said the right kind of war would help the economy, not that any war is a good thing. Krugman is consistently anti-war. He's also said an arms built-up to fight an alien invasion would be good for the economy and have great secondary effects (from research and whatnot.) He's also not seriously advocated that we arm up to fight an imaginary alien invasion.
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
The economics nobel prize is pretty strange. It is actually the "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel".
Keynsian is a bullshit method by pushing the problem into the future which only makes it that much worse. Pay now, or pay dearly later. That's because inflation is just a side-band form of taxation. Also, by targeting your budget into the future, you're actually effecting the present which in turn alters the very future you're trying to predict in the first place.
Life is not for the lazy.
No, you are thinking money in terms of your own bank account as a limited fund system. An Economy isn't as much about how much money but how much of it is moving. The more people the more money that can be moving at any point and a stronger economy. Now what slows it down is people who stop moving their money around as much. Such as our current situation where the Banks had stopped giving loans, that causes the people who needs the loans to not make purchases right away and save up funds. So the flow of money isn't as fluid anymore it is building being saved up. Which when it passes a threshold of when this happens too much that the person who is trying to save the money isn't getting as much revenue from a combination of lack of expansion and other people not spending to save their own money.
A higher population normally helps reduce this problem by averaging out the savers with the spenders. But also with a larger work force you have more competition where you have higher quality people to choose from. It feels like it sucks for the common Joe having so many people to compete with jobs, However if they are willing to see where their skill sets are they can find a job at their level. And jobs are available because there are more people who are buying goods and services.
Part of the success of the Baby Boomers was the influx in population. Today we see those immigrants as pull on our society, however I am under the impression if their skin was a little lighter they would have been welcomed as an important pool to keep the US population up, so we can keep expanding.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
Anybody else find it interesting/sad that the time limit on copyrights is longer than the privacy time limit on the Census records? Just a clear indication that corporations are valued above people.
The Broken Window Fallacy makes the assumption that resources would be put to optimum (or at least some) use without the window being broken. It assumes that replacing the broken window wastes the precious time from the already full schedule of busy glassmakers; in other words, it assumes that the main economic problem is producing as much as possible.
But that's not true of our current societies. We are producing plenty. The problem we face is that of distribution: as automation advances, less and less human labour is needed to produce the same output. At the same time our incentive structure is designed to reward work and penalize not working. As the amount of jobs steadily decreases, the system ends up penalizing people for not doing work that's not available.
The long-term solution requires rethinking our values, especially our dislike of people getting things without working for them (which is hypocritical anyway, since we are just fine with "investors" getting the rewards from other people's work). In the short term, however, breaking windows works as an emergency measure: it wastes resources, but gives the otherwise unemployed glassmakers something to lose besides their chains.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes, we all just have to accept the "truth" that the solution to too much debt is more debt, and that using scarce resources to make goods that nobody wants and are not useful to anybody will make us all wealthy beyond our wildest dreams.
Of course, the kind of garbage peddled by mainstream economists can't even be proven wrong, because "The solution to a depressed economy is more liquidity" is a statement that can't be falsified. 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."
But the important thing to remember is that anyone who disagrees with him is a member of an irrational cult who doesn't believe in truth or science.
Your wife forces you to eat her crappy cacciatore? Does she also send you to the store to buy the ingredients?
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
1. Correlation is not causation
2. There is no correlation, let alone causation. We had a recession in the 1950s and an even worse one in the 1970s. The cold war had nothing to do with economic fluctuations. And we had a boom in th 1990s after the Soviets broke up.
What happens is you have a war, the economy booms, then it crashes when you have to pay for that war. The '50s recession was paying for WWII and Eisenhower's dream (I'm glad for it, the interstate highways are great). The '70s recession and inflation paid for the horribly expensive Vietnam war. Our present economic woes are from fighting TWO expensive wars.
Nothing is more expensive than war, cold or hot.
Free Martian Whores!
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.