Ever done a census? Several hundred million dollars would equate to a few dollars a head in the US, which my gut feel says is not bad value (and may even be an

Ever done a census? Several hundred million dollars would equate to a few dollars a head in the US, which my gut feel says is not bad value (and may even be an unrealistic underestimate) That doesn't mean there aren't cheaper ways to generate specific figures/estimates than a census, but an important point is that those aren't censuses. Tabulation of the data is not the most expensive part, although even that is far more complicated than most realise. The data is literally not there to tally: you have to collect it. Now keep in mind you have to target and include, in no particular order: People with no homes People with no internet People with no smartphones Old people Young people People with lots of money People with no money Newborns The dead Non-English speakers The illiterate Etc. You need interviewers, transport, pre-testing and callibration, actual implementation, post-testing and calibration. This is all without even considering finding the people with the right skills to design, implement and coordinate this, and without accounting for any software or capital costs. Additionally, censuses ramp up and ramp down, you can't just put aside funding for the census year: systems of that size cannot be hired and deployed in that amount of time. It's a bigger operation with more bodies than many military exercises, and I'm guessing actually they do it N times cheaper. I'm assuming that the US census is much like ours: in the pre/post years you're planning the next roll out, analyzing the things that went wrong last year, experimenting with improvements, all with a possible backup-back out case in case those experiments go wrong and a hard deadline that cannot be missed.