Data Are Made, Not Found

By many measures, the US census is the government’s largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work—not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously—to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once—and only once—and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country’s most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians’ methods. 

This book is an ethnography of the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge—ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts—and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what I call “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements. 

Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses—and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy—are precarious. As I argue in the book, protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data.