U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Santos on the Importance of Diversity and Culturally Relevant Methods in Public Policy Research

[ROBERT SANTOS]

I feel that a person's culture, who they are, race, ethnicity, and so forth, their identity is critical to being successful in any career path that they take, and in fact I go further and say that if we, as individuals, want to be the best versions of ourselves as statisticians or analysts or policy makers or construction workers, or whatever, that you need to bring your whole self to the table.

[J.B. WOGAN]

I’m J.B. Wogan from Mathematica and welcome back to On the Evidence. Our guest for this episode is Robert Santos, director of the U.S. Census Bureau. Director Santos, who goes by Rob, is the first Latino and the second person of color to lead the agency. His career as a statistician, which spans more than 40 years, has included leadership posts at the Urban Institute and University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, better known as NORC.

In mid-January of 2024, Rob visited with Mathematica’s Latinx/Hispanic employee resource group for a discussion about measuring Latinx/Hispanic population trends in the U.S. and how people of Latinx and Hispanic heritage can advance in the field of the evidence-based public policy. I thought the Q&A was fascinating. It touched on themes that we’ve explored on the podcast in the past, which are also very much live issues in how Mathematica conducts its work. They talked about the role of technology in boosting the speed and scale of social science research, the importance of diversifying the pipeline of public policy researchers, and the potential of improving research methods through better engagement of and partnership with study participants. I’m grateful to the U.S. Census Bureau and Mathematica’s Latinx/Hispanic employee resource group for working with us to share a lightly edited version of the audio with you on this podcast.  

Mathematica’s Esteban Quiñones and Andrés Nigenda Zárate moderated the event. Esteban is a development economist and demographer involved in Mathematica’s climate change research. Andrés is a senior data scientist specializing in STEM and higher education. They also co-lead Mathematica’s Latinx/Hispanic employee resource group. In the first half of the conversation, Esteban led a discussion about how the Census measures the Latinx/Hispanic population in the U.S. In the second half, led by Andrés, Rob talks about the importance of diversity in the social science workforce.

You can find a transcript of the conversation at mathematica.org/ontheevidence. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

I think I’d like to move start our conversation, Rob. We’re absolutely delighted to have you here and to hear about your experiences and what I want to start off with, given your role at the Census, if you can share any interesting statistics or trends, particularly about Latinx and Hispanic populations in the U.S., that you find particularly interesting or that might be surprising to folks.

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Certainly, and thank you for the opportunity to be with you and to share some of my perspectives that might be a little unique and some data, too. So, with regard to Latinx, the Hispanic—I use them interchangeably—population, there were some kind of interesting things that came out of the 2020 census. You know, I go around the country at lot because I’m really committed to external engagement with various types of audiences and such, and I talk about how our country, our nation, is becoming increasingly, beautifully diverse, and it turns out that we hit, we, the Latinx population, hit 62 million in 2020, in terms of the population count, which represents about 19 percent of the overall U.S. residential population, which is almost one in five people. That’s a big deal.

In fact, in Texas and California, about 40 percent, just under 40 percent, of the population is Latinx. But I talk about the nation becoming diverse, but guess what? That applies to Latinx population as well. We’re becoming increasingly diverse. And in fact, there are eight different groups, subcategories of Latinx, that exceed a million in population in 2020. There's, of course, Mexican and Puerto Rican, which together account for like two out of three Latinx people, but there's also exceeding a million Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Colombianos and Hondurans. All of those succeed a million. So, there is a, there is this increasingly beautiful diversity, even within the Latino population. That surprised me a little. And it actually, it was heartwarming to see that.

The other thing that really surprised me is that if you think about like, 2010 to 2020, people like to measure population change and how much we're growing, et cetera. Well, the Latinx population in that decade, grew five times faster than the non-Hispanic population. So, Latinx/Hispanics grew about 23 percent, and it was about four percent for the non-Hispanics. Those are the things that really popped out at me, as well as the youth of the Latino/the Latinx population. I believe, I think it's something like over half, I could be wrong, but a huge chunk of the children of, of kids under 18 are Latinx and I think that speaks to, to sort of this diversity train that's left the station, that's being driven by the Latinx population, and it's coming. So those are my, my thoughts, right?

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

Those are really interesting and they very much so, I would say, resonate at least with my experience. So my family is from Ecuador. I grew up in Miami, certainly where there are a lot of, well there's a big mix of everyone, but especially of Cubans, and then since then I've lived in a number of places like Washington, D. C. and now in Chicago and where I’ve had the opportunity in a sense to get to know this diversity. Let's say, and so with, with that in mind, and let's say the growth that you point out, right? The roughly five times growth, I want to pivot to a question about how the U.S. Census Bureau might use, you know, technology, how do they leverage, you know, elements of innovation and we might even think about things like AI and how are those being used, you know, to effectively measure what is a exceedingly dynamic population like the Hispanic and Latinx one?

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Certainly, there are no silver bullet technical solutions to all of this. We do use AI, mostly right now as a mechanism for reducing respondent burden, so that if you have to pick through a bunch of lists and you start typing, it'll narrow down the list, that type of thing, they're relatively simple, and they've been, those solutions have been around for a while, but we are exploring other ways of, in most cases, we're looking right now, we're looking at the back end, the data dissemination and how to make sure that we can enable chat GPTs that, you know, those types of mechanisms and large language models to acquire actual census data rather than third-party data, which can have a lot of error associated with it because of their assumptions and such. So we're busy embedding the metadata that's necessary in our data products so that they can be called upon for the, when people use basically, AI and chat GPT types of programs.

When it comes to the Latino population itself, it's Latinos and Latinx population is, represents an historically undercounted population. They are a population that tends to have a gap with the rest of the country in terms of internet access. Even levels of literacy and, you know, financial literacy, and other, et cetera, and so we need to use the technology that we have to make sure that we can find the most culturally relevant ways to get to and to engage the Latino population. So it isn't really as much a technology solution to make it easier for Latinos and Latinx to participate as much as squeezing every ounce of insight that we can from existing data and then, understanding through our past experiences, especially COVID, that we need a different model of engagement with the American public and especially with historically undercounted populations to create more culturally relevant approaches to contacting and to encouraging participation and in many ways, and I've said this before in, in public engagements, it's not a matter of the Latino Director of the Census Bureau saying, “Please participate in surveys!” and expecting there to be a big response. That ain't going to happen.

We really need to get down to the community level, down on the street and getting, you know, pastors talking to their congregations, teachers talking to parents, community-based organizations working with families in need, among all the historically, undercounted populations, to make sure that those trusted messengers provide a message of comfort and encouragement to help their communities by participating.

So that's basically our approach to use technology to use AI, et cetera, as we can to help enable these more culturally relevant approaches to engagement and to empower networks out in the public, which is why one of my biggest priorities right now and the work that I'm doing is mostly on external engagement.

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

That raises some questions for me, let's say, in terms of the specifics that the Census engages in order to build trust within the Latinx and Hispanic community, including, you know, what are sort of some of the different models? Certainly community engagement is central to that, but I'd be curious if you could share more about, you know, what the Census Bureau does and what some of these, you know, more culturally relevant sort of approaches might be, which I have a feeling will certainly resonate with many staff here given the work we do.

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Yeah, it's interesting and it transcends sort of what I would expect this audience to think about when you think about approaches, because, you know, I've been a survey methodologist, you know, sampling statistician and a survey person for many years, and I think of, oh, you know what, what can we do in terms of color of the envelope and is it priority and, and, you know, different languages and things of that sort.

The types of things we're thinking about in terms of rethinking really stem from the 2020 census experience where in basically the week before Census Day, the entire country shut down because of COVID and so all of the planning and all of the methods and all of the community outreach that we had planned and that communities and community organizations themselves had planned, got flipped on its head. We had to rethink everything and coming out of that experience, what we realized even more so is that we cannot conduct censuses or even surveys without community engagement, without enabling local community organizations, elected officials, you know, the pastors, the teachers, et cetera, enabling them with tools and with information and messaging so that they can be empowered to relay those messages. So our models and the types of things we're looking for stem from things like finding out that a community organization and Fruitvale, Oakland created looked at EA cards that were instead of the classic icons, had little census symbols in them, and so they had the community playing census with that or going down the street in an ice cream truck with the, instead of playing music saying, you know, please fill out your census. Going to extraordinary measures to rethink what it means to engage within the context of COVID.

And so we're now taking those communities that all came together and those community organizations that all it came together and they don't want that momentum and what they created to end and we're re-engaging with them so that we can have a continuous relationship over the course of 10 years and we're working with them and using these between-census times to show the value proposition of the data. So we are, you know, we're creating data tools and sending it out to community organizations and doing presentations to them, talking about what data needs are. We have an effort that looks at how statistical products first that basically talks folks about what their issues are in local communities, so that we can develop better products. We're creating data visualizations that bring together different types of data, not just a single survey products, which is the sort of the classical thing, we're bringing together economic data and ACS data and data from the climate data, et cetera to build new tools for businesses for, for entrepreneurs, for local community groups, for community needs assessments, for public health groups, et cetera, and rethinking how it is that we give data. That's part of this overall engagement effort.

And then lastly, what we're doing is we're using the, something called the power of convening to bring those folks back together and yes, we'll give them the data so they can see the value proposition and they can, in turn work with local communities to do that, but we're also finding best practices and getting folks to work with each other to strengthen, to tap into existing networks, community networks, and create and strengthen new ones so that when the 2030 census comes along, we'll be in a much better situation to affect that engagement strategy with more culturally relevant solutions.

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

Thanks, I have to say that if I saw an ice cream truck and heard it play the census song, I would probably run down the street. Stop what I was doing. So I think we should think about how to scale that, but, but more seriously, I think, you know, it would be interesting to hear about what has gone well, in terms of community engagement and how receptive, you know, communities are, as well as, you know, what's challenging in a sense about engaging with communities. Because, from what I'm hearing, you say, you know, part of part of the effort that, that you're overseeing is that this is an ongoing conversation with communities, right? These, these aren't a data collection points in isolation, but at the same time, I would imagine that it takes quite a bit of time and effort to sort of build that trust and build that relationship and, and it changes over time, of course, as well. So if you could share some more about that.

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Okay, let's see. Let me see what more I can say about that. We are having a meeting upon meeting. These are virtual right now, but I'm doing a lot of external community engagement, but meeting upon meeting virtually bringing together different say, complete count committees across the U.S. and then having them talk to us about what worked and what didn't work in terms of the methodologies that they used, the approaches that they used for their specific populations, and getting from them what they need in terms of messaging, resource packets, best practices, et cetera, and allowing them to be part of the solution in the true spirit of community-based participatory research, allowing them to be part of the solution, both in terms of defining what the issues and problems are, but also in terms of the solutions. So that we can create these packets that then can be provided to them and do sort of train the trainer and then they can go and disseminate that with their partner agencies or community-based organizations. So we're taking a very much of a mobilization approach and it above all it just absolutely has to be culturally relevant.

There had been occasions just like in any large-scale operation, like the, like a decennial census, where there was a, say a messaging packet that was thought to be culturally sensitive, in this case, it was sort of American Indian/Alaska Native type of packet, and it went to a tribe or it went to folks in Alaska. Well, it ended up using, it ended up being a messaging that was really appropriate for North and South Dakota, but not at all appropriate for Alaska. And understanding, like I was talking about earlier, the diversity within groups that are historically undercounted and the need to make messaging that much more culturally relevant, so that it's tribe specific, not necessarily. Oh, we have a package for American Indians and Alaska Native that, no, that's not going to work. So we're really, we're doing a lot of work to make sure that folks understand the necessity of these highly tailored messaging systems, tools—not all tools are meant, you know, are effective for one population for another, even in the Latino community, I would expect there to be a different type of outreach and messaging and activity base, for areas or communities that tend to be sort of Latinx citizen communities as opposed to the immigrant communities of Latinos. There really needs to be that type of sensitivity as well as, you know, Colombianos versus Mexicans versus Cubans and so forth.

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

Yeah, the point about, and let's say how well certain tools fit culturally for different groups is certainly something I think that is important to us in the work that we do here, but also, you know, from my personal experiences and so, we did want to ask you a question about how, you know, the complexity of asking about race and ethnicity within the Latinx and Hispanic population shapes the work that you all do, and, you know, what the best approaches, you know, are that come to mind for, you know, asking these types of questions based on the proper context?

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Yeah, well, the research that we've done has shown pretty clearly that the Latinx population does not favor the two-question methodology of first asking Hispanic status, so to speak, and then asking race. There is no difference between the two for many, not all, but many in the Latinx community and the principle that I like to think about is that we need to allow people to tell their stories when it comes to race and ethnicity, be it Latinx or anyone, and it's incumbent upon us as analysts, as policy makers, as researchers, as scholars to take people's stories in terms of who they believe they are and how they want to express it, and then take that information and parse it into what different needs are. So, you know, for the scholars that want to study race separately from ethnicity, they can take what people say who they are and split it up. You know, you basically have a coding mechanism to split that up. For others, you can just leave it all into one.

The complexity comes and, and especially for the Latinx population, but also increasingly for the Black population, that there are multi-racial and there are multi-ethnic and there are multi-ethnic-racial populations that are blossoming and so what do you call someone who is, you know, German and Black and Mexican. People identify themselves for that purpose, but then from a policy making perspective, do we really want to put somebody in one of those boxes, or do we want to recognize the diversity and approach it from a different perspective? Maybe it's more important to understand people in terms of their language that they use at home, as opposed to, you know, what they say in terms of race or ethnicity or whether they're foreign-born status, they're all these different issues that come up that we need to be thinking about in terms of the collection of race and ethnicity.

What we do know is that the Office of Management and Budget will be rendering a revision for commentary through a federal register notice sometime this year. It will be based off the recommendation that came from a work group that was co-led by the Census Bureau and used the research that we had conducted back in the late teens, so to speak, like 2018 or 2015 or sometime, where we showed the efficacy of a single question, rather than the two-question model. We ended up with the two question model for the 2020 census because of an executive order and we look forward to what we believe is going to be an improved method of asking race ethnicity, especially as it relates to disaggregated race and ethnic groups as well as the ability to capture multi-racial and multi-ethnic groups.

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

Thanks, I think I could ask a number of follow-up questions, but I want to keep, I want to keep to the time and the structure so, I want to thank you for that, and I would like to pass things over to my colleague, Andrés, and who is who's going to lead the conversation with you about, let's say, diversity, ethnicity and, and all of those topics, but thank you so much.

ROBERT SANTOS]

Thank you, Esteban.

[ANDRÉS NIGENDA ZÁRATE]

Yeah, thank you, Esteban. Yeah, Rob, I want to focus as part of the conversation on talking about excelling and progressing in organizations as a Latino person and actually just bridging the first part of our conversation and talking about the increasing diversity in the U.S. and within the Latino community, having diverse research teams that might share live experiences with the population that they serve becomes more relevant and important and can have a myriad of benefits. I couldn't help, but think around issues like undercounting and thinking a little bit with my own experience how things so simple and essential as, for example, Latino names, like having two last names, has been challenging to navigate things from credit scores to gas bills and it has also given me the opportunity to think about data and in different ways and bring to the table different points of view. So I wanted to ask you, how important have you lived experiences as a Latino Hispanic person been to your professional success and can you think of examples, challenging examples, but also beneficial examples of this lived experience and how that might have related to your time at Urban, at the Census or elsewhere?

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Certainly, I've talked on many occasions about these types of issues. I feel that a person's culture, who they are, race, ethnicity, and so forth, their identity, is critical to being successful in any career path that they take, and in fact I go further and say that if we, as individuals, want to be the best versions of ourselves as statisticians or analysts or policy makers or construction workers, or whatever, that you need to bring your whole self to the table. Because when you, when you bring your culture, your value, your life experiences and you combine that with the technical training you have, something happens to your critical thinking. You end up with a perspective that is unique because it's based on all these unique characteristics and experiences that you've had, and that unique perspective is something that no one else has, and we deserve to hear those in any type of conversation, especially as it relates to how we're going to collect data on individuals, be it race, ethnicity, or be it something as simple as household income and such.

One of the examples I like to give is, is actually maybe a little jarring to some, and it's in the health research world, and it relates to when I was on an AHRQ panel, some of you may have heard this, and so if you have, you can, you can just think about other things until I finish this one. And what, what happened is that there was a, I was, I was on a panel study section. And so it was about, we were evaluating grant applications for health research and there was this one particular application that I wasn't assigned to, but other folks took the lead and there were like, they were just praising this left and right, and I looked at it and it was, from a technical perspective, just spectacular. It had, you know, when I think of a grant application, it has everything it needs like a good problem statement, justification, previous research, significance of the problem, the potential impact, and then you got to data collection. How are they going to, you know, how are they going to collect the data?

It was going to be a clinical trial. Not a clinical, but experimental design. Half of folks are getting one, half of folks are getting the other, the power of the statistics were great. The analytic plan was great, et cetera and it was about addressing a chronic pain. This was back before, in the, back before the Affordable Care Act when a lot of people didn't have health insurance and so they, these hospitals and clinics were just taking a beating because people were present to the, to the emergency room and hospitals were obliged to, you know, to help the population and the, the cost of the usual care, which is, you know, give meds and do this and do that was, was really putting a financial pressure on that sector of the, of the medical field, and so this researcher said, I've, let's create a solution for folks that don't have health insurance. We can have an alternative therapy that isn't as expensive and, and so forth and what we'll do is we'll do this, this experimental design where as people come in without health insurance, half of them will get the usual care and half of them won't, and we'll show that the alternative care is ends up being, you know, cost effective and it helps the people. And everyone in the study section was saying, this is brilliant. This is amazing, you know, we're helping out the financial institution, not the financial, the medical institution, because they're not taking a hit, we're helping out the people. It's a win-win situation.

And it was only because I was a Latino from the barrios of San Antonio and I knew mi gente, man. I don’t want my tia or my abuelita to get a different type of care than anyone else. So I raised my hand, and I said, I don't think, and I was, you know, historically shy, so it took a lot out of me to raise, I kind of shyly raised my hand and then I spoke, and I said, the, in my opinion, the way this grant is written, I don't think this grant should be approved because they were ready to pass it, to give it the best score, and I said the reason is because if we, if we fund this, then we are contributing to a two-tier health system. If you have health insurance, step over to door number one, we'll give the best meds, the best docs, et cetera. You don't have health insurance, step over to door number two, and we'll help you think through your pain, and I said, we cannot do this. If it's a good therapy, open it up to everyone, not just people with, with health insurance.

Okay, that is, is an example where I was the only person of color in the room and if I hadn't of opened their eyes to this issue, they very well would have, collectively, they would have funded the project and we'd be contributing toward it to two-tier health system. I couldn't do that. It took everything out of me, but they listened and got back to the researcher. I'm a statistician. Actually I was the, I was not just the only person of color, I was the only master's level statistician there, everybody else were these renowned PhD and MD researchers, so it took a lot out of me to speak up because they could have said, “No, you know, a stick to your, you know, power calculations and let us know if that's good.” But I did it because I brought my whole self to the table and that was a beginning for me to open up and recognize that, I, and we, collectively Latinos and, and everyone, needs to bring their whole selves to the table to provide our perspectives, because innovation, excellence are elevated when you bring your unique perspective and offer it, even if they don't adopt it, it adds to the mix. You get better dialogue, you get better consideration, better insights when you have more diverse opinions. I didn't mean to take that long. Sorry.

[ANDRÉS NIGENDA ZÁRATE]

Oh, no, no. That was incredible. Thank you so much. I think it's, it is definitely sometimes it's daunting to like, in the example that you gave just to raise your hands and say, like, “Hey, I have actually something to say, and it's relevant and it might have an impact in the way that we're thinking through this problem, not only from like the intellectual merit, but also like the societal outcomes of this research.” Yeah, that, that is a fascinating example, which leads me a little bit to a different question that relates to also some of these gaps that we're talking about for the Latino population. So, according to data from the census, American Community Survey, in 2019, Latino workers were about 18 percent of the U.S. workforce, but represented only 14 percent of STEM workers. So how important do you think that support from informal or formal Latino/Latinx/Hispanic groups and institutional DEI programs are to the growth and success of the Latino staff?

[ROBERT SANTOS]

I think they’re absolutely critical, of course. I hope, and no one would expect me to say otherwise. In fact, through the examples, I have many more examples like the one I gave you, but it’s through those examples that I am promoting the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, not as, well. Yes, as hey, it's a moral obligation and we should/need to do this for equity and humanity, but also to the scientists and researchers of the world, as this is a way to actually elevate excellence to a new level that nobody has dreamed of because it's by adding by nurturing these new diverse voices, having them bring their whole selves to the table and offering these different perspectives that you'll get new insights, new approaches, new methods, new measures, better measures, more relevant measures! And then you excel, you get something that's better than it ever would have been if you basically had the same type of people with the same type of thinking sit in their office and saying I think I have a solution.

That's why I'm such a big champion by the way of community-based or community engagement and community-based participatory research and all its, its continuum of forms, just this notion of getting more diverse perspectives, especially those whom you're trying to help, and the last thing I'll say about this is that I go full diverse perspective guys. So it's to me when we think about... Oh, let's have a new program. It's either in hunger or education or this, or that it's always think about it. It's always couched in the context of. Oh, you guys over there. You're, you have a, the gap you're, you know, you're not, you don't have the education level or you don't have this. You don't have that. Here's how we're going to help you when there's actually two parties involved in all of this. They're the institutions and they're the people and the outcomes of the people, be at health, be at career, be at wealth gap, et cetera, is necessarily the outcome of the interaction between the two, so we need to be thinking more about the institutional role to change itself, as well as how people can enable and help themselves. It takes two because if we only attend to one, it's, we're dead in the water guys. That's just my perspective after 40 years in policy research.

[ANDRÉS NIGENDA ZÁRATE]

Yeah, no, thank you so much for sharing that. Advancement in many organizations often seems focused on what an individual can and should do, but it, it is also typically the case that organizations and systems need to change to become more inclusive. Based on your own trajectory as a leader, do you have any suggestions for what senior staff/leaders can do to support the advancement of Latino staff? Can you think of any, like specific supports or initiatives that you found to be specially useful?

[ROBERT SANTOS]

I can talk a little bit about sort of the policy speech I gave on DEI at a National Advisory Committee meeting last year, and I talked about how, if you really believe in the DEI principles, you don't have to use the letters DEI. You don't have to use the words, you know, ‘diversity equity and inclusion.’ You can simply think about the value of getting diverse perspectives. And anytime you're a manager or a leader, and you're in charge of something as important as a research project, where, you know, you're going to be getting results that then you want to generalize to make policy recommendations, the first thing you should always do when you put a team together is to say, who am I missing? As in, what perspectives am I missing? You need that diversity if you want to excel, if you want to make something even better, and managers, especially in research companies, need to understand and embrace that, and I've been encouraging, you know, staff and again, using examples from my career about how we do that in terms of actually creating a leadership workforce that is wholly inclusive of people from different perspectives and backgrounds and races and ethnicities.

The other thing I've been doing is making sure that people understand the difference between policy and practice. You can have a policy that says all the right words about, Oh, you know, DEI and we're doing this and we're doing that. It's how you implement it and it needs to be in every day-type of activity where, every day, when you're faced with decisions about, Oh, we need a new work group to study this issue, rather than putting who, what you might perceive to be. Oh, these are the best people, we’ll put them on it, think about what's missing the, the, this diverse perspective. Because when you do something that I call a trajectory analysis, you may well find that the people that rise to the top that end up creating a non-diverse type of leadership group, resulted because very specific type of people were put on committees or allowed to work in this other area or, you know, did a little sabbatical or something or was given an opportunity for a, a conference paper. We need to be much much more inclusive about that, because it leads to better science and better data and better insights and better policy.

[ANDRÉS NIGENDA ZÁRATE]

Thank you, Rob. I really appreciate you sharing those that advice and those insights. On behalf of the Latinx/Hispanic ERG at Mathematica, we really thank you for joining us. You're always welcome at Mathematica. This was amazing, and I also just wanted to thank everyone involved in making this happen. The comms team for hosting and, again, thank you so much. Rob, we appreciate you.

[ROBERT SANTOS]

It’s part of what I do guys. Talk to you, be with you. So it's good. Let's do it again.

[ANDRÉS NIGENDA ZÁRATE]

Thank you so much.

[ROBERT SANTOS]

Bye, everyone.

[ESTEBAN QUIÑONES]

Bye, Rob. Thank you.

[J.B. WOGAN]

Thanks again to Robert Santos and the U.S. Census Bureau for allowing us to share this recording on our podcast. I also want to thank Mathematica’s Esteban Quiñones and Andrés Nigenda Zárate, who expertly moderated the conversation and were kind enough to include a few of my questions during the event. This episode is dropping in February of 2024, which happens to be the five-year anniversary of Mathematica’s On the Evidence podcast. Whether this is the first time you’re hearing us or you’ve been with us since 2019, thanks for listening. If you’re fan of the show, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps others discover our podcast. To catch future episodes of the show, subscribe by visiting us at mathematica.org/ontheevidence.