February 23, 2025

Official data bad news

  • USA: Unfortunately, the Economy Runs On the Data Trump Is Trying to Delete (article, podcast discussion)
  • New Zealand: Len Cook: Trust must be recovered after a second Census failure (The Post)
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Megan Pledger

    The 2023 census can be treated as an opt-in survey of around 4,400,000 people with an 88% response rate (and with the ~600,000 opt-outs being filled in at random or with admin data).

    Amongst surveys that have been published in academia, that’s not to be sniffed at.

    1 week ago Reply

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      This is true, but the Census isn’t *just* a general social survey, it’s also the mechanism for standardising all the other surveys we do to reduce non-response bias.

      7 days ago Reply

      • avatar
        Megan Pledger

        Yea, it’s just that some people hear “census bad” and then think everything about the census is bad.

        7 days ago Reply

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