PolicyGuy

Wednesday, June 30, 2004


Homeless Numbers Overestimated?
When data drive policy, it's important to have accurate numbers. The number of homeless persons was exaggerated for agenda-driven purposes during the 1980s.

At least that's the conclusion of a report in the Journal of Urban Affaiars, as reported by the Reason Public Policy Institute.

"Beginning in the early 1980s, estimates of the homeless were exaggerated, often 2 million or more. By the mid-1980s, reliable social science estimated numbers of homeless at much lower levels, between 250,000 and 350,000. The media continued to use the higher estimates because they relied on homeless activists and shelter providers for information, an inadequate defense of its more reliable homeless estimates by HUD, and the liberal bias of the media."

"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

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