Count Us Out

Nos among the noses

Censuses have become part of modern life, whether the counted cared to have their noses tallied or not. But in a rare display of actuarial obstinacy, West Germans last week won a skirmish in a war that attacks the very concept of the national head count.

Leading the fight was the Green Party, a loose amalgam of environmentalists and antinuclear militants, which charged that the Volkszaehlung, or people count, amounted to an invasion of privacy. (The questionnaire asks about everything from monthly rent to religious beliefs.) Last week an eight-judge federal court decided that there was merit to the argument and ordered the census postponed.

The case should answer an interesting question: Does the government's need to know about its citizenry, for such purposes as economic planning and urban development, supersede the individual's right to privacy? In West Germany at least, the government has unwittingly undermined its case with less-than-convincing assurances that census information would be treated confidentially. Official credibility was certainly not helped by disclosures that Munich census takers would be paid a bonus of $1 for every unregistered German they turned up and $2 for each illegal alien. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.