Byron Villacís

Contemporary public administrations seem to surrender to the need to digitize as much as possible¹. Nowadays, it appears to be a desirable transformation: less paper, more automation, increased efficiency, and less time spent on paperwork that governments sometimes overwhelm us with. However, this tendency also has unintended consequences with political, economic, and social effects. We need to stop and evaluate all the costs and benefits of digitization and bureaucratic automation. In this post, I briefly exemplify the differences that can appear if we minimize the importance of a logistical operation such as the population census and we fall in the overconfidence of trusting population projections.