The U.S. Constitution requires that a population count be conducted at the beginning of every decade.
This census has always been charged with political significance, and continues to be. That’s clear from the controversy over the conduct of the upcoming 2020 census.
But it’s less widely known how important the census has been in developing the U.S. computer industry, a story that I tell in my new book, “Republic of Numbers: Unexpected Stories of Mathematical Americans through History.”
Population Growth
The only use of the census clearly specified in the Constitution is to allocate seats in the House of Representatives. More populous states get more seats.
A minimalist interpretation of the census mission would require reporting only the overall population of each state. But the census has never confined itself to this.
A complicating factor emerged right at the beginning, with the Constitution’s distinction between “free persons” and “three-fifths of all other persons.” This was the Founding Fathers’ infamous mealy-mouthed compromise between those states with a large number of enslaved persons and those states where relatively few lived.
The first census, in 1790, also made nonconstitutionally mandated distinctions by age and sex. In subsequent decades, many other personal attributes were probed as well: occupational status, marital status, educational status, place of birth and so on.
As the country grew, each census required greater effort than the last, not merely ..
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