A Cornell University professor's new book examines how political pressure, a pandemic and years of planning shaped the 2020 U.S. census. Danah boyd, who spent eight years observing Census Bureau workers, argues that the count depends on a series of consequential human decisions rather than a simple tally.
Boyd discussed the book, “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census,” in a Cornell Chronicle interview. Published Sept. 24 by the University of Chicago Press, it follows the decade of preparation for the 2020 census and the pressures that emerged as the bureau carried it out.
Boyd, the Geri Gay Professor of Communication in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, first worked with the bureau as a member of a federal advisory committee in 2016. She said she initially viewed the census mainly as a head count, then came to understand how much its methods and legitimacy can be contested.
Her subsequent research took her inside the agency over eight years. She described watching career employees manage the technical and organizational work needed to complete the count while political figures pressed to change methods or cast doubt on the resulting data.
Why the census became a Jenga analogy
The book's Jenga image reflects the way boyd saw accumulating pressures on a system that has to remain stable to function. New requirements and the elimination of practices that had worked, she said, could make the system increasingly vulnerable even before an obvious failure appeared.
The COVID-19 pandemic added another strain during the 2020 count. Boyd said the book traces controversies surrounding that census rather than treating the final numbers as something that simply appeared at the end of a routine process.
She does not describe all pressure on the bureau as malicious. In the interview, she said both well-intentioned and harmful actions placed demands on the system while civil servants worked to keep it operating. That distinction is central to her account of how institutions become brittle.
Boyd said decisions about producing data are inherently political because people must choose methods with real consequences. Her concern goes further: elected officials may try to control those methods or undermine trust in the data for partisan ends, she said.
Data quality and public trust
Boyd identified three themes running through the book: data are made through choices, public systems can become fragile under accumulating pressure, and trust in official information depends on relationships as well as technical quality.
In her view, the legitimacy of data is a social process. She said people and institutions need to invest in the relationships surrounding data collection if they want the public to trust both the numbers and the agencies producing them.
The book also highlights workers whose roles are often overlooked. Boyd said she wrote partly to help readers understand the bureau's work and Congress' ability to support or weaken it. She called the project a recognition of civil servants who carried out the census despite the pressures she documented.
Boyd was leading the independent research institute Data & Society when she began studying the bureau. In the interview, she expressed concern that criticism of federal employees could discourage young people from considering public service and said the trend predates the current administration.
Her account is based on her observations and interpretation of the bureau's experience, not a new statistical assessment of the 2020 count. The book asks readers to look at the decisions, workers and public relationships behind an official number before judging whether they trust it.
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