Imputed racial tax data beats the complete absence of it

Evidence

Each of these methods, of course, has advantages and disadvantages. Relying on data imputed from proxies inevitably means that some classifications will be inaccurate—just because most people in the zip code are black and have a black-sounding surname or are white with a white-sounding surname doesn’t mean everyone is. But they are a thousand times better than nothing, which is what we have now. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 519

Categorization

• APHORISMS: A sharp epistemic principle: imperfect proxy data is a thousand times better than nothing when the alternative is willful ignorance.