I’ve been cranking away on my census book these past few months. I’m almost finished revising the preface and chapter 1 to submit as part of the book proposal review process, and a rough draft of chapter 2 is also complete.

I wrote a short piece on the history of the US census while I was doing background research last fall. It was recently published in Metropolitics, which is an on-line academic journal that specializes in short pieces on cities, urban politics, and urban economics. The journal was originally created in Paris as Metropolitiques, and a separate English-language version with a New York-based editorial board was created more recently. Each version is published independently and a select number of articles are translated from one version and published in the other, giving it a unique international flair in terms of content and contributors. A new article in the English version is published every Tuesday.

I wrote the piece as a lead-in to the 2020 census, which we’re starting to hear more about in the news. After spending a decade of research on creating new and improved categories for the race question, the OMB and White House decided not to accept the Bureau’s proposal and thus we’re keeping the same categories from 2010 and 2000. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is lobbying for a adding a citizenship question, which already appears in the American Community Survey and has not appeared in the short form of the decennial census since 1950. Read the article and follow the links to the references to see what the repercussions could be. The questions and categories must be finalized by March 31st…