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Comment by throwawayffffas

1 day ago

Exactly why a government may refrain from collecting such data, as it is not even relevant in any kind of policy decision.

10 comments

throwawayffffas

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nullc  21 hours ago

Winner winner. Every piece of data a state forcefully collects and retains should be strictly necessary for an important function and balanced carefully against worst case misuse.

0xbadcafebee  1 day ago

What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens.

Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religious data, and it turns out 50% of the population is Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu. So half the population now has to pay a tax, which is effectively a tax on their religion, because their religious belief says they can't eat pork.

This is a made up example, but the point is that you need to know about your citizens so you can make just laws that respect those citizens (and encourage businesses, job training, etc based on demographics). It's why we have a census.

  • harrall  1 day ago

    Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants.

    It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out.

    Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly for decision making, even if the intention is good, and the intentions have also been very bad.

    • 0xbadcafebee  20 hours ago

      > It’s not to be used directly for decision making

      It was literally introduced for the decision making I mentioned. The US Census was introduced for the reasons of creating better representation for the actual, specific populations in the US.

      In 1810, the Census started collecting information on manufacturing and manufactured products, and later agriculture. In 1850, it collected social data, including religious information. It has expanded many times over the years, in order to collect the data needed to more accurately serve the needs of the people. It started counting Native Americans in 1860, stopped counting Slaves in 1870, and started counting Native Americans living on Reservations in 1890. Over the years additional entries have been added as different peoples have immigrated, changes to the country (like the Great Depression), and in 2020 for the first time, questions asking about same-sex couples/spouses/partners.

      These questions may seem invasive, but they actually help protect vulnerable people, by showing the number of people who are impacted by the economy, by policy, and more.

    • mikey_p  1 day ago

      > Laws aren’t made that way

      That's basically exactly how they get made. You don't know anything about the agriculture checkoff in the US, do you?

      Every single pound of pork sold or produced in the US sent a tiny amount of it's sale price to the "Pork. The Other White Meat" campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork._The_Other_White_Meat

      > laws made that way usually aren’t good.

      I don't think anyone said they were good laws.

  • throwawayffffas  1 day ago

    The government does not need the census to tell it that 50% of the population is of a particular religion, polling like that routinely happens, the census is about voter districts and how many representatives each state gets to elect, the same is true in other democracies as well.

    I can think of at least of one European country that does not collect religious, racial and ethnic data during their census. They collect socioeconomic and another but not these. Germany does not do a census at all.