is usually studied as a problem of efficiency and is more revealing when studied as a culture.
A form is not merely an instrument for collecting information; it is a statement about what kinds of person exist.
A box marked '' with no option for unpaid care work is making a claim, not asking a question.
Those who fill in forms learn quickly which answers the system can process.
They then supply those answers, and the resulting data describe the form as much as the population.
working inside offices have documented the same on the other side of the counter.
Clerks develop informal categories that are more accurate than the official ones and cannot be recorded.
A case classified as routine because no other box fits is remembered by the clerk as something else entirely.
The official record and the working knowledge , and only one of them is transmitted upwards.
Senior officials therefore govern on the basis of a description their own staff privately regard as false.
This is not and nobody has lied at any point in the chain.
The information was lost at the moment of classification, which is a design feature and not a failure.
Anthropologists describe such systems as producing , a capacity to see a population in a particular way.
Legibility is genuinely useful and is achieved by discarding everything that does not fit the categories.
A state that could see everything would be unable to act, and one that sees too little acts confidently and wrongly.
The interesting question is therefore not how to remove categories but how often to revise them.
Most administrative categories in use were designed for a population that has since changed considerably.
Revising them is , produces no announcement, and alters what a government is capable of noticing.