Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Conflicting data

Today's D&C features a page 1, above-the-fold article claiming that NY State led the nation in the number of people leaving the state between 2000 and 2008.

Entitled, "N.Y. tops in people loss," the story is based on a report just released by the Empire Center for New York State Policy. This report, which can be found here, says that it is "[b]ased on the latest data from the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service."

Table 2 of this report claims to show the 2000-to-2008 population changes in each county in the state. However, when I saw that Monroe County had supposedly lost 20,783 people over those 8 years I began to suspect something was amiss.

You see, the U.S. Census Bureau has its population data on line and the loss it reports for Monroe County over the same 8 year period is a substantially smaller 6,252.

Curious as to the difference in combined population loss for the 12 counties which comprise DOR as reported by these sources, I created the following table from the on line Census data and Table 2 of the ECFNYSP report.

And so, if the ECFNYSP report is to be believed, DOR has lost 2.3% of its overall population over the last 8 years, while the census data on which it is supposedly based indicates that loss to be 0.7%.

While neither figure is significant in comparison with our 25.3% drop in Mass attendance over the same period, does anyone have any doubt which set of numbers DOR will cite the next time it blames declining Mass attendance on "demographic shifts?"

4 comments:

Ben Anderson said...

I wonder if maybe one is net population loss and one is total people not here that were here 8 years ago? Just a shot in the dark.

Bro. AJK said...

Well, my word verification is a real one: defect

Which make me wonder about the poll. The Census counts everyone. Perhaps The Empire Center is counting legal citizens?

Anonymous said...

The news concerning the possible return of thousands of Anglicans to the Church is exciting. Yet there is no mention in the courier. And when 2 Anglical bishops recently returned to the Church, there was also no mention in the COurier.

HMMM. It seems the Courier is the mouthpiece of a bishop who is aligned with pro-homosexual elements in the Catholic church and wants to suppress any news of any contrary information.

A Secular Franciscan said...

Anonymous - there are two world and nation stories about the Anglican provision in the 10/20 online edition of the Courier, and another one in the 10/26 edition.