Privatization is destructive theft

[altivo]

Statistical Abstract of the United States, the annually-produced compendium of data about the US economy and population, is doomed.

I missed the original controversy last year when in a fit of (no doubt GOP-inspired) cost cutting, the Bureau of the Census decided to stop producing this report. The estimated savings? They cut 24 full time jobs and saved a measly three million dollars a year, effectively killing a reputable source of information relied upon by social, economic, and marketing researchers since 1878.

But wait, the annual volume will still be prepared by the private corporations ProQuest and Bernan. The Bureau of the Census will no longer even collect the data, though. ProQuest must come up with the figures on its own. I don't know about you, but I trust a private capitalist corporation to do this impartially about as much as I could single-handedly throw the entire set of volumes from 1878 to 2012 across the street. This is like appointing Fox News to publish the Federal Register (and maybe that will be next.)

The 2012 volume, last to be printed and distributed by the Government Printing Office, cost $36 in paperback or $41 in hardcover. So what is ProQuest's price for the 2013 volume? It just arrived on my desk with an invoice for $180. If the data were still being generated by the federal government and paid for by taxpayers, this would be unconscionable. ProQuest can no doubt justify the price based on the need to collect the data itself, but I question the methodology and do not trust the impartiality of the result.

A lot of what can be derived from the Statistical Abstract is pretty embarrassing to the United States, when you come right down to it. Levels of poverty, education, health care etc. are far worse than we are often led to believe. Availability of high technology such as broadband internet, digital television, or cell phone services is still concentrated in the densely populated areas and often completely lacking in rural communities. The Bureau of the Census has done an admirable (if politically unpopular) job of detailing and reporting these facts over the years. Now we are about to trade those facts for a glossy, shined-up corporate report on the glories of free markets and capitalism. Blech.

I have recommended that we cancel our standing order for Statistical Abstract and return the 2013 volume to the publisher.

Comments

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

They duplicate research perhaps out of the reasons you cite, or maybe because they don't know it's already there. What's that saying about never attribute to malice what could be attributed to incompetence? Not that incompetence is good either. How much could be saved if people just stopped reinventing the same wheels? But since these are politicians, I'm perfectly willing to agree, in a lot of cases, they're trying to come up with more pleasing results for their own political ends.

What you said about the FCC's theory of "failure to adopt" vs. "inability to obtain" is interesting. I don't have much to say, but it does have me thinking.

[altivo]

As well it should. The biggest flaw in the Obama health care "reform" is a similar assumption: that requiring people to buy health insurance will somehow solve the problem of unaffordable health care (whose unaffordability consists in part of the unaffordable price of the insurance.) There is nothing in the new law to control the costs or keep them from continuing to rise at an uncontrolled rate. Politicians and bureaucrats are often just as ignorant and narrow sighted as voters are.