Mr. ROMNEY. Dr. Eckler, I wonder if it would be possible, when you have some fairly definite results, that you can draw conclusions from, if you could supply us with this information, supply the special inquiry with this information?

Mr. ECKLER. We will be very happy to do so, Mr. Romney.

Mr. CORNISH. Mr. Director, you state that the outside income is broken down into categories in order to arrive at a more accurate figure.

Mr. RANDALL. I stated that.

Mr. CORNISH. You indicated it somewhere.

Mr. ECKLER. Yes; I think it is implied also in my statement.
Mr. CORNISH. Both of you did, actually?

Mr. ECKLER. Yes.

Mr. CORNISH. I wonder when the enumerator goes to the farm, could he not ask the farmer if his total outside income figure included all of the items listed in the categories; would this not give you a similar accuracy without a written breakdown on the form itself?

Mr. RANDALL. There are really two problems here as far as I am concerned.

One is the figure for the year of the census itself, and I think Mr. Eckler's questions about details related to that question.

The other question as far as I am concerned, or as far as the Department is concerned, is that we do not have census information or sample information for every year. We do need to make an estimate for every year.

And so, since the components do not necessarily change from one year to the next in the same way, in our opinion at least we can make a better estimate for the years for which we do not have a census figure, if we have the components so that we can take wages and salaries, for example, and estimate the changes in that component, and take income from off-farm business and estimate the changes in that component, and do it with each of these separate components and add them together which gives us a better estimate for the years in between censuses than we could if we just had global total and were forced to somehow or other estimate how this total changed from one year to the next. This is the importance of the separate components from our point of view.

Mr. ECKLER. I think I would add that, in addition to Mr. Randall's testimony regarding the need for the parts, that the total would also be more accurately obtained if we got the parts and put them together, rather than to do this checklist approach.

I think we cannot be sure that the enumerators will do that very consistently or the person responding will respond very consistently. He will just say yes. We get more complete reports by going through the parts.

Mr. CORNISH. Under the present system, the farm operator indeed provides this information for other people. I wonder if it would not be more accurate, which is one of your objectives as you have just said, if the financial information was gained from the individuals rather than someone else.

Mr. ECKLER. I think it would be.

Mr. CORNISH. And also before you were talking about the fact that there seemed to be very few objections to the types of questions asked on such questionnaires as the farm census. I think this was explicitly pointed to in the sample which was mentioned earlier.

Do you not think also that the American people are so used to being asked to answer question on forms and questionnaires that even if they did have any objections, they probably would just say, "Well, I will just go ahead and answer it because I know if I do not I will get in trouble. I am required under the law to do this. If I protest, I will have to go to court and this is going to cost money, and I really have no way of appealing this."

Do you not feel that the inclination is, whether you like the questions or not, to just answer them and shut up?

Mr. ECKLER. Mr. Cornish, I take a somewhat more optimistic view about our people. I am inclined to think that the greater acceptance of questions and the better cooperation are due to the fact that more and more people realize that a nation like ours needs to have statistics for guidance in many decisions, decisions that are made at the local level, the national level, by businesses, and so on.

They get some exposure to this in the schools through the statistics that the children talk about, and get exposed to, and I believe that the Nation as a whole is getting more sophisticated in this matter and there is a greater acceptance of the fact that when you operate in a free society, you need information about the activities of our economy.

So I am hopeful that it is not just because of a passive acceptance, but rather a belief that this is a part of the duty of citizens in this kind of society.

Mr. CORNISH. I would agree, Mr. Director, that perhaps the citizen might not have any objection to answering all of the other sections of the farm census questionnaire, but possibly he might have a legitimate objection to answering some of the questions in section 11.

This raises the point what happens in this instance, where a person does have what he considers to be a legitimate objection.

Mr. ECKLER. I would like to expand a little bit, and this partly is brought about as a result of some of the chairman's remarks earlier. I think that the Census Bureau does have a focal responsibility in this matter of considering privacy, and while we welcome the help of the Budget Bureau, which has to review these things, I think that we do have a very key role in this matter. It is forced upon us by just the nature of things. We are in the business of taking censuses and surveys. If we become characterized as an organization that is asking unreasonable things, is improperly guilty of undue prying or anything else, it damages our ability to do our job, which we think is an important job.

So we must be, I think, continuously mindful of the fact that an unreasonable inquiry in one area may affect cooperation in other areas, whether it is a census or whether it is a job we do for another agency. We take all this seriously because we do a good many jobs for other agencies and they sometimes have some questions that we have great concern about. We are the ones that bear the burden, we are the ones that have agents out there asking questions, and we expect to be in business for some time.

So this is a concern. If citizens come to the conclusion that we are asking prying questions, questions not pertinent to the purposes of the job, it will have an effect. We give a great deal of consideration to this, and I think our committee, as Dr. Taeuber says, also gives a great deal of attention to this.

So if there are questions of the type that seem to be completely alien to the inquiry, or an invasion of privacy in a way that has been referred to here earlier today, we want to identify those and we want to take steps to have them eliminated.

Mr. GALLAGHER. The Chair thanks Mr. Eckler for that statement. We certainly concur.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why we wanted to bring out that the information was adequately protected, so that you could carry out your duties more efficiently. This inquiry is concerned with what you said.

In a free society, there are a great many activities that must be measured, but with all the questionnaires and with all of the things that we are swallowing now, there is a very great possibility that we might be questionnairing our way out of a free society, and I think it is a healthy thing if we can continue to review our policies, and if we take a fresh look at where we are headed in this entire area.

I wonder, perhaps in a lighter vein, whether or not the fact these 332 questions must be answered by farmers, could be a reason why more people are leaving the farm?

Another thing, why do you question them merely about Irish potatoes?

Mr. RANDALL. I think the sweetpotatoes are on there some place, are they not?

Mr. GALLAGHER. No, just Irish potatoes.

Mr. TAEUBER. You perhaps have a schedule for a State that does not grow any significant quantity of sweetpotatoes.

Mr. GALLAGHER. Yes; this is a New Jersey questionnaire.

Mr. TAEUBER. The Georgia questionnaire asks for sweetpotatoes as well.

Mr. GALLAGHER. You mean New Jersey merely grows Irish potatoes?

There are a lot of people in New Jersey because there were no Irish potatoes in Ireland, notably my grandparents.

Mr. TAEUBER. The sweetpotatoes must not be commercially significant.

Mr. GALLAGHER. But Irish potatoes are commercially significant in New Jersey?

Mr. TAEUBER. In New Jersey.

Mr. GALLAGHER. And no other potato?

I am glad that the Irish are making a contribution that is significant enough to point out in the questionnaire, that there are no other potatoes.

Mr. CORNISH. Mr. Chairman, during our informal interviews prior to this hearing, we spoke to Mr. Randall and he gave us a rather interesting reaction on some of his personal views in regard to Government questionnaires and other forms that people are often asked to fill out. I wonder if he might be willing to share some of those with us today?

Mr. GALLAGHER. We would be delighted to hear them.
Mr. RANDALL. I will be glad to, Mr. Chairman.

I think my observation, Mr. Cornish and Mr. Romney, was along the line that although I am a statistician by profession, and if people generally could quit answering questionnaires I would be unemployed guess, I personally react to questionnaires in about the following

I

manner, and it does not make any difference whether it is Government questionnaires or some other kind.

If I am convinced that the information that is being asked for on the questionnaire is needed and will serve a useful purpose, and is a proper concern of whatever agency is responsible for the questionnaire, I will be glad to fill it out to the best of my ability. But if I think they are asking for information that is not essential to the express purpose of the questionnaire, I will tend to throw it in the wastebasket.

Mr. GALLAGHER. You are fortunate. This is one of the things that we encourage, but unfortunately, many people in Government service until recently, if they did this, would be throwing their career in the wastepaper basket, including some people who worked in very sensitive jobs, who felt that their sex lives and their religious beliefs had no bearing on their typing ability, and did just that, and they ended up where the questionnaire ended up.

So we encourage this kind of thinking, and I am glad that this spirit still prevails. If we could engender a little more thinking like this, perhaps we could not only acquire better and more significant information, but at the same time we would be protecting the individuals involved.

Mr. ROMNEY. I do not know which one of you gentlemen would care to comment on this, but this is a followup on a question that was just asked.

On the farm census form, section 11, there are columns 11 and 12 which seem to have lumped together in them a number of sources of income. I am wondering whether or not it may not have been a rather arbitrary grouping for this reason. Some of these sources of income would tend to be stable or even constant. Others would tend to fluctuate in accordance with the economic conditions.

If the totals of these columns are to be benchmarked for your further statistical analysis, how can they really serve that purpose well when they may consist of categories of income which are not compatible?

Mr. RANDALL. I will comment on that and if any of the rest of you want to comment, that is all right too.

I would say, Mr. Romney, that even this four-component setup is in itself a compromise back from the most desirable situation.

If you had what the statistician himself would really like to have, you would have asked for a good deal more detail. But you have to make compromises between what you want and what seems to be practicable, and this is the compromise that was arrived at through this review in the advisory committee process as giving us as much useful information as possible without becoming unreasonable in terms of the question on the questionnaire.

Yes, you could have asked for additional detail, but you also have to compromise between what seems to be the most desirable from the standpoint of what you need and what is practical from the standpoint of inclusion in the questionnaire.

Mr. ECKLER. You see Mr. Romney is getting to be a statistician. He looks at these parts and sees some behave one way and others in another way, so we ought to have additional categories.

Mr. RANDALL. As a statistician and in charge of making these estimates, if I were asked what I would really like to have, I would and probably did ask for more detail than this. But this is the

compromise that comes out of the need of the statistician and the reactions of the advisory committee and the people in charge of the census as to what is practical to ask people to provide.

Mr. ROMNEY. It may not be a question of whether there should be additional categories. It may be a question of fewer categories. But my basic point is, how can the analysis be meaningful when these individual components in the columns do not seem to be compatible and would fluctuate independently?

Mr. RANDALL. The first two categories are reasonably clear cut, and subject to roughly the same general influence. I mean each one is separate to a set of influences. The last two are not nearly so clear cut.

Mr. ROMNEY. These are the ones I had specific reference to.

Mr. RANDALL. Well, my reaction is, this is not as good as I would like to have, but it is the best they will give me and I make do with the best I can get.

Mr. ECKLER. If I may supplement this, Mr. Romney, I think it is true that whenever a census is taken, it may happen to fall in a year which is high in the business cycle or low in the business cycle or somewhere in the middle. So the results may not be, strictly average.

And in interpreting the results of the census and the benchmarks that are provided, allowance has to be made for the fact that it may be unduly high because we were at a very active period or, conversely, unduly low because we are at a low period. The only way to get away from this is to move toward annual surveys, which would give information for each year, but certainly for a smaller number of geographic areas.

And to some extent the Department of Agriculture does move in that direction with its annual surveys, but this is a good point which you really cannot get away from in any census. You may happen to hit a year which is quite extreme.

Mr. GALLAGHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Eckler and the other witnesses. The Chair would like to thank you for your cooperation and your excellent presentation, and for your willingness to accept the suggestions that we have made, and we would also like to state that we hope there will be an awareness in other agencies of the Government such as you obviously have for this problem, the problem for the need for the collection of information as well as the very great necessity of protecting the people that we are collecting the information on. And so the Chair would like to thank the three witnesses. You are excused.

Mr. ECKLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

(The following were later submitted for inclusion in the record:)

STATEMENT OF ANGUS MCDONALD, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, NATIONAL FARMERS UNION

Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, our attention has recently been called to the fact that certain persons assigned by the Census Bureau of the United States have required farmers to answer certain questions which in our opinion, are an invasion of their privacy. We are referring to questions addressed to farm men and women in regard to income of persons who may be employed by and living in the home of the farmer.

For example, the farmer is required to ascertain the income of such hired men and women in addition to the income derived by employment on the farm. One can easily imagine such questions would prove embarrassing in certain instances,