Every ten years the same question comes up. Is an estimation the same thing as an enumeration? The latest incarnation of the question is in Adam Korzeniewski’s post at The American Mind:

Contrary to its image in the mainstream media, the Census does not behave like a studiously nonpartisan agency. Many of those in leadership made their negative opinions of former president Trump clear. Historically, Census Apportionment numbers appear to favor liberal, blue states over conservative, red states in the final rounds of representative allocations. This likely stems from the use of “hot-deck imputation,” a controversial method where the Census will use a nearest, most similar neighbor to impute the characteristic, population, etc., of a household who does not fill out the Census or respond to enumeration attempts. A more radical method called “count imputation” creates a whole person at an unresponsive household. These are persons without available Federal or state records. In Utah v. Evans, 536 U.S. 452 (2002), the Supreme Court left imputation to the Secretary of Commerce’s discretion because, in the majority view, it does not constitute statistical sampling, prohibited in 13 U.S.C. §195. It can be argued that hot-deck imputation favors more liberal states over more conservative ones, more urban states over more rural states. Specifically, it favors states that have areas of low response rates to the Census.

The Census justifies count imputation methodology through comparison to existing, known datasets. But this is an information asymmetry. Epistemologically speaking, you cannot compare an unknown unknown to a known unknown variable by simply randomizing a sample of known quantities. The quality of these households overwhelmingly self-responding to the Census, or responding to Census Enumerators (workers), makes these households sufficiently distinct from nonresponsive households with zero records. While imputing missing demographic characteristics makes sense, adding entire people does not. In 2000, the Census Bureau imputed 1,172,144 people and in 2010, 1,163,462.

After field data collection, the Census begins data processing. This phase showed a discrepancy of tens of thousands of persons in particular Northeastern states, primarily centered around “Group Quarters,” a special kind of residence that the occupants don’t normally rent or own, and where they usually receive a service, such as a nursing home or university. Normally, these are enumerated separately by specialists trained to handle their unique circumstances. But these facilities were difficult to access in 2020 because of the pandemic-related lockdowns.

Given the complications, the Census decided to apply “Group Quarters Imputation,” a process that was never brought to the states to give input on, nor practiced in the 2020 Decennial Testing Phases. This process created hypothetical persons missing in the data, but it is not an imputation method by definition. This “Group Quarters Imputation” used a linear regression analysis based off estimates from the Group Quarters themselves, yielding a ratio by which Census analysts would impute the population of each facility. The use of the term “imputation” in this case is egregious. It constitutes statistical sampling, which is forbidden by law for Census enumeration. This method also heavily favors the Northeast because of the density of college campuses in that region and the fact that the lockdown was the most severe there during the Decennial Census.

Article I, Section 2 of the U. S. constitutions says:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States… according to their respective Numbers… . The actual Enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years.

To the best of my knowledge the U. S. was the first country to adopt such a provision—the first of its censuses was in 1790 and took 18 months to accomplish. I haven’t been able to discover when estimation techniques augmented actual enumeration in coming up with the census totals. As long as money and power is involved in the census resuits I don’t anticipate controversy over the census to abate.

However, from a methodological standpoint simultaneously interpolating and extrapolating is problematic. In the trade it’s known as “making stuff up”.

I was amused that the editors of the Washington Post’s have apparently just discovered Article, Section 7 of the U. S. Cosntitution:

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

Not in the Senate and especially not in the White House:

As The Post’s Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager reported, objections from lawmakers in Mr. Biden’s own party range from the categorical — Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (D-W.Va.) objection to lifting the tax rate on any corporation beyond 25 percent — to the parochial — blue-state Democrats’ demand for expanded deductibility of the high state and local taxes their upper-income constituents pay. The most recent development in this vein was an appeal from farm-state Democrats led by Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa) seeking protection against Mr. Biden’s plan to eliminate a huge loophole in the capital gains tax. Closing the loophole would increase what people owe the government when they inherit appreciated assets such as stocks, bonds — or agricultural land.

Mr. Biden has appropriately declared himself willing to negotiate, but he and congressional leaders must stand firmly against special pleading from within their own party, lest his plans become bogged down or fail altogether. This will be difficult, given the Democrats’ razor-thin majorities in both houses, which means tiny handfuls of lawmakers, or individual ones, can exercise decisive leverage.

Mr. Biden’s best bet is to articulate broad principles, such as pay-as-you-go and tax-code equity, and reject any and all ideas inconsistent with them. Undoing the limitation on state and local tax payment deductibility, and thereby undoing one of the few progressive features of the 2017 Republican tax law, would fail this test. Depending on the details, Mr. Manchin’s 25 percent corporate tax rate could pass, since it represents a 4 percentage point increase over the 21 percent established in 2017. As for pay-as-you-go, Mr. Biden has already said he is “not willing to not pay for” his plans, useful pushback against the temptation among some Democrats to skip the tough politics of taxes altogether and put the entire spending boost on the national credit card.

Most of the Congress’s power resides in its control over the tax code and its ability to carve out exceptions for causes or groups it favors. Asking it to abstain from that would be a bitter pill.

I also have a question. If the gauge of whether something is good policy is how it polls:

The White House has reminded Democratic lawmakers of poll numbers showing wide support for raising taxes on corporations and the tiny sliver of upper-income households targeted in Mr. Biden’s plans.

why do we need a Congress at all?

The thing that puzzled me about Sean Joyce’s Washington Post op-ed on cybersecurity:

We need a different approach to protecting our way of life. We need an approach within the government — specifically, one organization, headed by the new national cyber director, with three separate units: one focused on strengthening public-private partnerships, one focused on offensive and defensive operations, and one focused on intelligence-collection, analysis and sharing.

Currently, private firms often do not know whom or where to call inside the government. Sometimes, companies reach out to the FBI, sometimes to the Secret Service, sometimes to the National Security Agency and sometimes to CISA. This causes confusion and inefficiencies. A centralized partnerships unit, which is led by the CISA director and coordinates cyber efforts on behalf of the government with the private sector, could streamline these efforts.

Second, we need to ensure that official responses to attacks are handled in a centralized, coordinated manner by a unit solely focused on offensive and defensive operations. For example, the recent SolarWinds attack by Russia targeting a ubiquitous software application would be handled by this unit. The operations unit would be led by the FBI and NSA (agencies with primary jurisdiction in national security matters) with participation from the Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations and other relevant agencies.

Third, we need to create an intelligence capability with the private sector. The government has struggled at sharing real-time intelligence; the private sector, made up of innumerable companies, has too. The intelligence and analysis unit would be led by the CIA and FBI to ensure that all intelligence is gathered, analyzed and disseminated appropriately throughout the intelligence community and private sector.

is why he thinks that’s a “modern approach”? Quite to the contrary I think the bureaucratic strategy he proposes is very much what would have been done had we faced cybersecurity threats in 1990, in 1970, or in 1950. Would it be an improvement over what we’re doing now? I have no idea but I think it would fail for the same reason that maneuver warfare is not a good approach for coping with terrorists.

Meanwhile in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Thomas Ayres proposes we do almost the opposite—go really old school and issue letters of marque:

Today’s pirates sail the cyber seas searching for loot, by ransom or theft. Like their 19th-century maritime counterparts, they respect no sovereignty and disrupt commerce and daily life. This weekend’s Colonial Pipeline hack and the recent SolarWinds attack demonstrate the growing danger and sophistication of such assaults. Like the Barbary pirates, hackers frequently receive haven or direct support from hostile states like Russia or China.

Hackers routinely exploit private corporations as an entry point to lucrative private assets or national-security vulnerabilities. The SolarWinds hackers launched attacks from systems run by Microsoft and Amazon. The National Security Agency, which has primary responsibility for protecting cyberspace, is legally barred from monitoring and collecting intelligence from U.S. entities. Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice president for security, told the Journal in March: “This is a sophisticated actor that apparently took time to research legal authority. It knew that by operating from servers in the United States, it could evade some of the U.S. government’s best threat hunters.”

Corporate threat hunters could fill the gap, acting as cyber scouts in support of the government’s efforts. But that comes with risk: Equifax, Home Depot and Uber have each paid more than $100 million in fines and settlements due to hacker-breached customer data. Numerous lawsuits remain unresolved; in a typical case, Walmart faced a suit alleging a breach of the California Consumer Privacy Act because hackers illegally harvested private consumer data. The judge ruled in the company’s favor, but only because the hack predated the law.

Corporations have financial incentives to protect their data; what they lack is incentives to cooperate with the NSA and to report data breaches to the government in a timely manner. Security journalist Dan Swinhoe reports that hacking has cost companies nearly $1.3 billion. Cognizant of dangers to their bottom line, corporations hire cyber defense specialists. But when their measures prove insufficient against ever more skilled and avaricious hackers, companies freeze. Fearful of litigation, bad publicity and punitive regulation, they delay reporting until they know the extent of the problem. That reduces the company’s risk of exposure at the cost of exacerbating the national-security threat.

When a kidnapper makes a ransom demand, the best approach is to notify law enforcement quickly. Similarly, the best way to limit the damage of hacker breaches is for the target to share information quickly with the government—in this case, the NSA. That’s where letters of marque come in.

Historically, such letters provided financial incentives to overcome fear and inaction in the face of dangerous outcomes and national need. On the high seas, they assured standing and rights in admiralty courts that awarded “prize money” when pirate ships were sunk or captured.

Cyber letters of marque could establish incentives for timely information sharing and ensure that companies have the freedom to defend themselves. A company targeted by hackers would apply to Congress, which would grant a letter of marque providing limited immunity from regulatory action when breaches and activities are spotted early and shared expeditiously with U.S. agencies. And while corporations should take all measures necessary to make consumers whole when they are breached, Congress could also provide limited protection against punitive lawsuits against companies that meet accepted standards of cyber defense, provide early reporting, and take robust defensive measures against their hackers.

We haven’t had a cyber Pearl Harbor, but today’s threat from hackers could become as dangerous as enemy submarines. Congress should rally behind a nonpartisan initiative and begin issuing letters of marque now. Enlist private corporations to serve as our cyber scouts just as the Resolute searched for hidden dangers in an earlier time of global upheaval and uncertainty.

I have two points of disagreement with that. First, I don’t think it’s true that

Corporations have financial incentives to protect their data; what they lack is incentives to cooperate with the NSA and to report data breaches to the government in a timely manner.

or, at least I don’t believe their financial incentives are sufficient for them to do what they’d need to do to defend themselves from attack. I have an idea for remedying that which I feel sure would work but am equally sure that companies would hate like poison: strict liability. That would certainly increase their incentives.

My other point of disagreement is this:

We haven’t had a cyber Pearl Harbor

I think we have a cyber Pearl Harbor just about every day but it’s not concentrated against just one target but launched against thousands or tens of thousands of sites, generally by bots. It’s cost is already orders of magnitude beyond the actual cost in dollars of Pearl Harbor. It’s just not as dramatic and there’s little direct loss of life.

I think his suggestion has merit but doesn’t go far enough. The public sector is just not agile enough to deal with cyber-terrorism. Sufficient rewards could induce whole industries to spring up to bring these criminals to justice.

Speaking of booms and busts, I wanted to point out this op-ed at Bloombergt by Amanda Little disagreeing with those who are worried about a declining U. S. birth rate:

Before clamoring for more mouths to feed, we need to recognize the dire realities of world hunger today and the gravely concerning predictions for famine and malnutrition in the decades to come. Let’s get a plan in place to ensure climate stability and greater food security going forward. Until then, a slowdown in population growth not only eases pressures on a stressed planet, it will make it possible to feed more people more intelligently and sustainably, with higher-quality food.

Let’s first establish that declining population trends are occurring well beyond the U.S. Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation reported that as of 2017, the global fertility rate had fallen by nearly half since 1950, to 2.4 births per woman from 4.6. They expect the world to reach a peak population of 9.7 billion inhabitants around 2060 before dipping to 8.8 billion by 2100. Twenty-three nations — including Italy, South Korea and Japan — are expected to see their populations reduced by more than half within that 2017-2100 timeframe. For now, though, even feeding 9 billion people by mid-century looks like an iffy prospect.

Birthrate declines are occurring alongside a concurrent trend: hunger. After falling for decades, global food insecurity is rising again, driven by extreme weather, political conflict and economic slowdowns intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic. Roughly 700 million people in the world are undernourished — a surge of 60 million in five years and almost 10% of the world population, according to a new report from the United Nation’s World Food Programme.

I have mixed feelings about just how real worries about “food insecurity” are for several reasons. The first is that its definition is pretty fuzzy. It ranges from famine to unemployment depending at least in part on where you are. I think that famine is a political phenomenon as it has been throughout history.

Here in the U. S. I think that a lot of food insecurity is a consequence of preference and ignorance. When you’ll only eat McDonalds burgers, fries, and shakes it’s both expensive and unhealthful. The solution to that is not giving people enough money to afford McDonalds burgers, fries, and shakes. The primary beneficiaries of that strategy would be franchisees and McDonalds stockholders.

She then launches into a Malthusian argument that was wrong 200 years ago and is still wrong:

By mid-century, the world may reach a threshold of global warming “beyond which current agricultural practices can no longer support large human civilizations,” the International Panel of Climate Change has warned. U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Jerry Hatfield put it to me this way: “The single biggest threat of climate change is the collapse of food systems.”

While it may be true that the biggest threat presented by climate change would be collapse of food systems I don’t think that the greatest risk of collapse of food systems lies in climate change but in bad government policy. Subsidizing subsistence agriculture in places where it is marginal at best does not sound to me like a winning strategy but is extremely commonplace. The better strategy would be getting people out of subsistence agriculture and into more efficient uses of labor but that would require abandoning traditional behaviors. The greatest impediment to that strategy right now is China. Rather than importing raw materials from such countries and exporting manufactured goods to them it should be importing manufactured goods from them and boosting their own internal consumer markets and abandoning import quotas to encourage that.

I agree with the editors of the Washington Post:

A reasonable case can be made — eminent economists such as Lawrence H. Summers have made it — that President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan was too large and too late, putting an already recovering economy at risk of overheating. But the new inflation numbers don’t yet prove it. First, the price increases they reflect are relative to an anomalously low baseline: April 2020, when the U.S. economy was essentially paralyzed. Second, the headline consumer price index includes volatile sectors such as food and energy. Without those, the rise in “core” inflation was tamer. As for the labor market, in which the number of job openings, 8.2 million, now roughly equals the job shortfall relative to pre-pandemic times, some workers are clearly staying on the sidelines because $300 federal unemployment insurance supplements deter them from seeking service-sector positions. Mr. Biden was wrong to dismiss that concern in remarks Tuesday; yet he was surely right to note that other issues, such as a lack of child care and lingering fear of contracting the coronavirus, are also depressing labor supply.

but I disagree with their conclusion:

This is no time for anyone to cling dogmatically to prior beliefs. That goes for the administration’s critics but also for the administration itself, and for the Fed. Robust growth coupled with tolerable inflation remains the likeliest scenario for 2021, and a month or two of bad data would not suggest otherwise. If the data changes, however, policymakers must be ready to change, too.

One data point doth not a trend make but the data points are beginning to accumulate. The difference between a “risk” and an “issue” is that a risk is something that may happen while an issue is something that has already happened. The way you deal with risks is by putting mitigation plans into force. I think the risks are considerably higher than the editors apparently do and once it has become an issue it could already be too late. Where’s the mitigation plan? When “doubling down” on fiscal stimulus actually heightens the risk, it’s not a mitigation plan.

I wanted to call a post at The Moderate Voice to your attention. The post, written by Terry Thompson, a prof at Johns Hopkins, and explains some of the complexities in national cyber-security defense. That’s a topic much in the news due to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack following hard on the heels of the SolarWinds hack. Here’s it’s opening:

The ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline on May 7, 2021, exemplifies the huge challenges the U.S. faces in shoring up its cyber defenses. The private company, which controls a significant component of the U.S. energy infrastructure and supplies nearly half of the East Coast’s liquid fuels, was vulnerable to an all-too-common type of cyber attack. The FBI has attributed the attack to a Russian cybercrime gang. It would be difficult for the government to mandate better security at private companies, and the government is unable to provide that security for the private sector.

Similarly, the SolarWinds hack, one of the most devastating cyber attacks in history, which came to light in December 2020, exposed vulnerabilities in global software supply chains that affect government and private sector computer systems. It was a major breach of national security that revealed gaps in U.S. cyber defenses.

These gaps include inadequate security by a major software producer, fragmented authority for government support to the private sector, blurred lines between organized crime and international espionage, and a national shortfall in software and cybersecurity skills. None of these gaps is easily bridged, but the scope and impact of the SolarWinds attack show how critical controlling these gaps is to U.S. national security

He goes on to claim that national cyberdefense is a “wicked problem”:

National cyber defense is an example of a “wicked problem,” a policy problem that has no clear solution or measure of success. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission identified many inadequacies of U.S. national cyber defenses. In its 2020 report, the commission noted that “There is still not a clear unity of effort or theory of victory driving the federal government’s approach to protecting and securing cyberspace.”

which is where we part company. I don’t that that national cyberdefense is a wicked problem. I think it’s a complex one, one that we haven’t set up the structures to address, and will be expensive to counter but it does not fit the definition of a wicked problem. A classic example of a wicked problem in geopolitics is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s a wicked problem because the Israelis reject, correctly, its resolution.

As I see it ransomware attacks like the one on the Colonial Pipeline are asymmetric warfare, prosecuted by non-state actors. IMO the DoD is not positioned particularly well to address it. That doesn’t make it a wicked problem. It makes it a problem that is best addressed by the private sector, including by issuing letters of marque. IMO it’s a bureaucratic problem as much as anything else.

The Daily Mail reports that 120 retired general officers have signed a letter questioning President Biden’s competence:

A group of more than 120 retired military officers have written to President Joe Biden to tell him his election was less than legitimate – while questioning his mental acuity.

The letter echoes former President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud – which have not been borne out in the courts – and comes on a day when Rep. Liz Cheney ripped Trump for his claim that the election was ‘stolen.’

‘Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the ‘will of the people’ our Constitutional Republic is lost,’ the letter from retired officers says.

The group calls itself ‘Flag Officers 4 America’ and consists of retired military officers including generals and admirals.

‘The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020,’ they wrote.

The letter, called an ‘Open Letter from Retired Generals and Admirals,’ was reported by Politico.

It echoes Trump’s claims that absentee ballots are not secure as it goes after Biden, who serves as Commander in Chief of the military.

The letter is reproduced in the report. This strikes me as extremely serious and fraught with risk. Perhaps someone more familiar with the Uniform Code of Military Justice than I could comment but if I remember correctly even though retired these officers remain liable for court martial for insubordination with possible reduction in rank or worse.

Here’s the peroration of Douglas Holtz-Eakin’s pointed criticism of the American Jobs Plan (AJP) and American Families Plan (AFP) at The Hill:

Long-run trend growth is fundamentally about expanding the supply of goods and services, real wages and standards of living. The AJP and AFP must be evaluated based on their ability to expand these. At present, they fail this test. There is nothing about raising the corporate rate to an uncompetitive level, raising the only global minimum tax in the developed world by another 50 percent, more than doubling the tax on the majority of capital gains, and more that will enhance saving, investment, and supply growth. Proponents counter that those tax revenues fund productive investments that outweigh the tax-based headwinds. Unfortunately, a careful and detailed American Action Forum analysis of these claims indicates that even a disciplined investment program will fall short. The AJP and AFP need to be rethought from the perspective of economic growth.

There are policymakers who don’t agree with his premise. They believe that “trend growth” is completely dependent on demand side factors and that’s not the exclusive domain of either political party. The Bush and Trump tax cuts in the personal income tax rate were both predicated on that assumption. And it’s pretty clearly the view of the Biden Administration.

My own view is that for the last 20 years we’ve had an enormous and unwelcome disconnect among achievable goals, necessary objectives, economic assumptions, and policy prescriptions and I see things getting worse rather than better in that regard.

If you’ve been wondering how best to adapt to the hybrid workplaces which certainly seem to be in all our futures, Daniel Freedman has some tips at RealClearMarkets:

• Increase the frequency of employee communications.
• Articulate a clear mission, reinforced through regular storytelling.
• Deliberately create social interactions online.

My own experience is that whether you’re productive working remotely largely depends on you. I’m actually more productive when I don’t go into the office or as now when I can’t go into the office (the office is in London). But I’ve had decades of experience with working from home. The experience of others may be different.

One of the things I wonder about is how managers, particularly top managers, are coping. My intuition is that bad managers don’t find the experience at all rewarding and, sadly, there are a lot of bad managers out there.