I have a short article in the Freeman Online today about the stupid U.S. Census ads claiming they need data to make decisions about how many buses or hospital beds a community needs. The two main points are:
1) In a market, you don’t need a census to tell you how many goods to provide.
2) Without a market, you won’t know how many goods to provide even with a census. From the article,
“Has the grocer ever run ads claiming that without your household survey, he won’t know how much food to stock?”
And,
“They cannot know how many hospital beds or buses to provide without population data. The dirty little secret is that they cannot know how many hospital beds or buses to provide with population data either.”
Read the rest here.