As you know, a general population census is taking place in Russia, an event that is not only of the most important sociological significance, but should play a primary role in the country's economic life. In connection with this event, a lot of publications appear on the most popular Russian portal Pikabu.ru , in which Russians share their impressions of participating in it. These impressions are shocking. Here are just a tiny fraction of them:
- An acquaintance works in the census as a runner from apartment to apartment. In a few days of work, only 5% of the apartments were open. As a result, in such a situation, they came up with a brilliant idea from above: to transfer the data from the last population census to the current one. Brilliant. My friend now sits at home, does not go anywhere, but simply rewrites everyone over a cup of coffee since 2010 (sort of like).
- At work I was asked to go through an electronic census, I went to public services, I enter the address of the apartment that I am currently renting, in response the system says “you cannot go through the census at this address”. I’m so well, ok, I’m starting to enter my registration address, but I’m registered in a military town on the border of the Moscow and Vladimir regions, and it seems like our officials don’t know which area to cram him into, so he simply isn’t in the database, and there’s no way to select him.
I thought, okay, I'll try to enter the address of my father's house, start looking, there is no such house. I was tormented for about an hour and a half, I entered data on everyone, and the authorities, as it were, asks to unsubscribe whether they have already passed or not. I look, there is an option to choose that I do not have a place of residence, poked it there, clicked confirm and voila, the site wrote that I was such a good fellow, get your signature gifts from (nafig useless to anyone) Sberbank. So now I'm a bum. The whole department was laughing.
PS
A notification was sent to the mail: "Congratulations, you have passed the census blah blah blah, soon the scribes will come to you, show them the qr code ..."
- On Friday morning, 2 grandmothers came to rewrite. He said that I would rewrite myself on the GU. Today is Sunday evening. A call from the manager of the company, "why aren't you texting?" To put it mildly, I was surprised. What does the Criminal Code care about and why do they have information about who is rewritten and who is not .
Demographer Dmitry Zakotyansky comments on this situation:
I looked at the opinions that have already appeared, and although these are absolutely high-quality and not representative opinions of a fairly certain stratum of people, their massiveness and level of "love" and views, coupled with what can be found in some polls (SuperJob) and coupled with the general idea of the level of mistrust in the state in the current environment, they leave a very, very strong feeling that this census is so epoch-making and unprecedentedly disastrous that the results will simply be impossible to use for what they are intended for.
And to get some slighly real figures, you will either have to very much adjust the census data according to indirect data (accounting, other databases, surveys), which already devalues the very meaning of the census, or completely wait for the next census and simply accept that, at least For the next decade, we do not know anything more or less precise about the population.
Information work has absolutely, absolutely failed, in order to explain to people why they need a census (and this is not only about the Pikabu posts - both non-sociologists' friends and parents have to be explained).
Again, "digitalization" has rendered a "disservice", which has been actively promoted by the state in recent years, and because of which people have the opinion that the state knows everything about them and can collect it itself.
Here is the control of everything by the state that has sharply increased over the past decade, which either creates in people a feeling that the state knows, and / or brings people to such a fear of communicating something, which was not even close before.
This is also expected, justly and strongly increased distrust of the state - a failure in income and development, which has been dragging on for a decade, fear of the state. If we have all the data since the last census, we have collected so much, digital systems have been created up to a heap, they only began to control more and more everywhere, but they didn’t live better from all this data, the standard of living has only failed over the years, the urban / social fabric is falling apart, for There is practically no development outside the capitals - what is the motivation for the state to report something? At the everyday level, through the eyes of a layman who has already been controlled, intimidated, pulled out a bunch of data, and whose standard of living, at least, did not get better (and became worse for many) - for what?
Here is the experienced experience of fraudsters, which has already been so imprinted in the mass consciousness over the past years that physical interaction is categorically discouraged. Household crooks, telephone crooks, last census crooks, what's left in the memory. And no, after all, there is a fight against them, no matter how the power leviathan grows and no matter how the control of the special services of society expands. Opposition and dissatisfied - please. And using all these resources to stop fraudsters is weak.
This also includes the experience of falsifications unprecedented in the modern history of Russia at other all-Russian events such as elections. Never before in modern Russia (after the 90s) has the state deceived people so much and never before has this understanding reached such a level.
This also includes a change in values among young people, who in the world are moving away from trust in traditional state institutions and practices, even in the conditions of fully "working" states, and in Russia this is even more aggravated.
This is a pandemic, to conduct a census, on the wave of which it is simply the worst decision of all that could ever be thought of.
How many people will not be included in the census this time? 30% somewhere? Not less. And among youth age groups and in cities with a population of one million or half a million, will it be up to 40%? It will be absolutely impossible to work with the same data.
It’s just tens of billions into the pipe, it’s unclear what quality and usefulness the output data is, a spoiled base for further calculations of indicators, and it’s all clear from all this that this census will definitely cost some completely non-zero part of the population to be infected with the virus.
And, after all, the next census will not be better. Given the development of trends in relations between the state and society in our country, we can expect that the failure of the conditional 2030 census will only be even greater. Like 2040.
So what to do? At least cancel the census.
And it would be possible (and necessary) to switch to registers, integrate all this with bases, triangulate, but registers and all other bases, after all, anyway, will not give a lot of data that can only be obtained by continuous polling. For 80% of the population, for example, even something could be collected, but the remaining 20% are people from whom, after all, all the same, only physically information can be collected.
This is a failure. It would seem that "big date", a bunch of databases and all these newfangled popular words about the growing volume of information about people, but in fact, in a continuous and universal representation, we only know less and worse about the population every decade. The amount of information about the majority of the population has grown a lot, yes. But the coverage, as we have now received, has clearly decreased significantly (and he was limping in 2010, in very good conditions in many ways, and especially in Moscow and St. ~ 1.5 were caught, and no less than a million refuseniks / absent at home were simply invented by the census takers - that is, even then, in almost ideal conditions, the census in Moscow could not cover about 20%). And the minority, about which we know quite little and very poorly, is no longer such a minority.
How further we will calculate the indicators, on the basis of what perverted adjustments and additional accounting, it is not clear ... "