Turns out the Census cost less than expected.  I’ve always admired the Census Bureau for their good work, but now in this time of runaway government spending they came in 11% (NY Times) under budget.  That’s truly good work.

According to the Times, the massive advertising campaign helped get people to mail in their forms.  The lack of natural disasters and epidemics helped too.  Now we can look forward to the deluge of data that social scientists will probably go to town on, so I imagine.

Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.