It's Brian Lehrer, and this is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios.

It's Thursday, May 14th.

The federal government's largest ever peacetime workforce deployment was supposed to begin yesterday. Were it not for COVID-19,

nearly half a million census takers would have been deployed starting yesterday to follow up with

residents who had not yet filled out a 2020 census form. So listeners, fill out your census form,

fill out your census form, fill out your census form, fill out your census form.

Of course, COVID-19 did happen, postponing the operation at least for now. It's unclear when and

how it will be safe for census takers to do their jobs in person, if at all, this year.

And although this pandemic is unprecedented, the United States and countries around the world have been enumerating populations during all sorts of crises from wars to famines and, yes, other pandemics.

So join me now to talk about the 3,000-year history of the census and how it's fairing in the digital age during a pandemic is

Andrew Whitby, data scientist and author of The Sum of the People, how the census has shaped

nations from the ancient world to the modern age. Andrew, Dr. Whitby, welcome to WNYC.

Thank you so much for coming on with us. Thanks for having me on the show.

Your personal history and census history intersect. You're right in the book about how you learned

about the term census from the Bible. So for listeners who might not be familiar, who is calling

for a census in the Bible and what happens next? Yeah, so there's

actually a lot of censuses in the Bible. The book of numbers is basically named that for a bunch

of Old Testament censuses that happen. But the one that I think is most familiar to people,

the one that I definitely encountered in early life myself,

was the census that's related in the Gospel of Luke. And that's the census that happens as the kind

of backdrop to the nativity story. So the reason that Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus of Nazareth,

are traveling to Bethlehem and end up, you know, Jesus being born in

...