statistics grew out of a broader interest in public policy; also part of the backdrop is that I had spent a summer during college in Washington, DC and liked it very much. My first summer job at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1987 grew out of a tip from Don Rubin about people in Washington to contact. I would credit Nat Schenker, who went to the Census Bureau after studying with Don at the University of Chicago, with helping me get a job the next summer on the Census Bureau's Undercount Research Staff, which was led by Howard Hogan. I had met Nat when he gave a presentation in a seminar course Don was offering during my first year on statistical issues in census-undercount estimation, which isto members of an advisory panel to the Secretary of Commerce, who was supposed to make a decision in the spring of 1991 on a possible statistical adjustment of the census. The panel had its origins in a lawsuit by large jurisdictions pressing for census adjustment and was comprised of four individuals identified by the plaintiffs and four chosen by the defendants. At the JSM session, with hundreds of people in attendance, William Kruskal, a choice of the lawsuit defendants, had offered damning criticism of proposed adjustment methods, while Eugene Ericksen, Kirk Wolter, and Leo Estrada, all choices of the plaintiffs, had offered damning criticism of an unadjusted census. During the floor discussion, after identifying myself, I asked Professor Kruskal what data he would need to see in