JST1960 to 2020 · sources in view
Sixty years of growth. Not everyone was counted in it.
The economy grew and people lived longer on average. Underneath the averages the instruments meant to catch the gaps kept missing. Every budget already carries the cost.
Pick an indicator. Watch the arc.
Each one carries its years and its source in the same view. Never in a footnote.
The method is 127 years old. The problem it solved never left.
In 1899 W.E.B. Du Bois published The Philadelphia Negro from thousands of door-to-door interviews in the Seventh Ward, with a printed interview schedule anyone could audit. Aggregate numbers hide the block. Every framework since confirmed it.
Just Society Technologies, on methodFive forces landing at once.
Each one lands hardest where disinvestment already took hold. A household living where they converge does not experience them one at a time.
Climate change
0Billion-dollar disasters a year, 2018 to 2022 average, against roughly 3 a year in the 1980s.
NOAA NCEIAutomation
0%Of job tasks face reshaping within a decade. Black and Latino workers carry roughly 28 percent higher displacement risk.
Brookings; McKinsey Global InstituteWealth inequality
0¢Median Black family wealth per dollar of white family wealth. $44,900 against $285,000 in 2022.
Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances 2022Health beyond the clinic
~6 yrsBlack-white life expectancy gap by 2020, up from roughly 3.6 in 2019. Health shocks land where care is thinnest.
CDC NCHSHyper-urbanization
0%Growth in suburban poverty, 2000 to 2020. More than 130 rural hospitals closed since 2010.
Brookings; Sheps CenterThe instruments keep missing.
86 percent of local health departments cannot run a community health assessment without outside support (NACCHO, 2019). Standard outreach reaches about 15 of every 100 people a decision is meant to serve. Peer-to-peer research is designed to reach 70 to 85.
Reach figures are JST planning benchmarks. Internal target, pending field validation.
Standard outreach. JST planning benchmark.
Why trusted peers reach where institutions cannot.
- Survey response has collapsed.Telephone response fell from 36 percent in 1997 to 6 percent in 2018. The people who stop answering are not a random sample.Pew Research Center, 2019
- Hidden populations need a different instrument.Where no sampling frame exists, peer-driven referral reaches the population through its own networks.Heckathorn, D.D. (1997). Social Problems, 44(2).
- Peers against professional outreach, tested.A peer-driven model tested directly against professional outreach workers.Broadhead, Heckathorn et al. (1995). Journal of Drug Issues, 25(3).
- Trusted laypeople move outcomes.In a multicenter randomized trial, community health workers hired from the neighborhoods they served cut hospitalizations.Kangovi et al. (2018). JAMA Internal Medicine, 178(12).
The count keeps missing the same people.
The 2020 Census Post-Enumeration Survey confirmed what community organizations have documented for decades.
U.S. Census Bureau, Post-Enumeration Survey estimates, 2020.
Four mechanisms of invisibility, and a fifth of a different kind.
Administrative
No record exists.
Hover →The person never touched the institution creating records. The system cannot miss what it never met.
Spatial
Outside the frame.
Hover →A motel, a car, a doubled-up unit, a rural stretch between jurisdictions.
Relational
Reachable only through trust.
Hover →The enumerator at the door is sometimes the institution that harmed the household last time.
Temporal
Gone when the count arrived.
Hover →There when the decision was made, gone when the data was collected. Mobility reads as absence.
The fifth
Counted, then erased.
Hover →Reached and counted, then suppressed when disclosure control over-suppresses small cells.
Built to speak the language institutions already use.
HDI and MPI compatible, so findings translate without conversion.
Disaggregation
By income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability and geography, at the subnational level.
Statistical performance
Data sources and data products where national systems structurally fail.
Quality framework
Provenance bands map to relevance, accuracy and coherence.
CHW guidelines
Paid, supervised, credentialed community health workers. The Cheti ladder operationalizes this.
See the evidence in your context.
A briefing walks through what these numbers mean for your place and what a current count would change.
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