All those charts, graphs and demographics that we saw is a good thing that can help to understand different neighborhoods of the New York City. Presentation looked nice and colorful. However, because of all those numbers I had a nasty feeling that humanity is not important. As Remarque wrote in “The Black Obelisk,” “the death of one person is tragedy, the death of millions is statistics.” That is exactly what those charts with numbers represent. They represent each person just as a number. Than means that each of us just as number and if we will die, will get education or will drop out of a college it will not have any effect on the charts because we can always be replaced by another number.
From one point of view demographics helps to understand the population that lives in different neighborhoods, their needs, their values, helps to shape policy for each place. From another point of view charts with numbers dehumanize people by making them just a number instead of separate human being. Also big companies, politicians use demographics to manipulate people by adjusting their behavior and their goods to different communities.
So we do need to use demography but we cannot forget that those numbers are people not just numbers.