A lot of population numbers are fake

https://davidoks.blog/p/a-lot-of-population-numbers-are-fake

by bookofjoe • 6 months ago

401 322 6 months ago

direwolf204• 6 months ago

A previous employer deployed a wireless relay network through the jungle in PNG and had rules to obey to avoid being accused of witchcraft and burned.

ChrisGreenHeur• 6 months ago

Would they normally do witchcraft if they did not have those rules?

anonymous9082133• 6 months ago

We all do witchcraft on a daily basis. I am manipulating light on a sub-microscopic scale to beam words into your retina from across the world. They are right to be distrustful of our ways.

peterlk• 6 months ago

My dad has some stories of working in Burkina Faso (and Mali, and other countries) with a drone, and having to appease locals about his witch-bird. A lot if places in Africa still prosecute witchcraft.

ashleyn• 6 months ago

Curious what the rules were.

escapecharacter• 6 months ago

This is a EULA I'd love to read.

direwolf204• 6 months ago

probably mostly "stay well away from people and stay away from these areas"

coredog64• 6 months ago

PNG is so violent that you don't even have to be accused of witchcraft to have something bad happen to you.

I worked at an NGO in the region and made several duty travel trips to PNG. The office building I was working in had a platoon of security guards and metal detectors in the lobbies of every floor. A local employee kept an M-16 and ammunition locked in the server room. We had to have security escorts to travel anywhere outside of downtown Port Moresby. Coworkers shared stories of being carjacked like you or I might relate losing a phone.

eitally• 6 months ago

I spent a lot of time working in Brazil between 2004-2015 and in the first five years or so of that, it was very similar to what you describe (though not the onsite weaponry in offices). Most expats lived in secure walled compounds and execs usually used bulletproof transportation. And this was in Sao Paulo state, not even an out of the way part of the country.

paganel• 6 months ago

a wireless relay network through the jungle in

Can you blame them? I personally can't.

jmclnx• 6 months ago

Cannot get to the page, from the wayback machine, the link works odd for me, but select "A lot of population numbers are fake" once the page displays.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260129141207/https://davidoks....

mrjay42• 6 months ago

Exactly the same for me, thanks for the link!

bookofjoe3• 6 months ago

https://archive.ph/n59iR

bookofjoe3• 6 months ago

https://archive.ph/n59iR

kubanczyk• 6 months ago

The page has been archived with a popup obscuring the main point of the text about Papua New Guinea. This rule in uBlock Origin cleans it up for me:

    ##article > div:nth-of-type(1) > div

AreShoesFeet0004• 6 months ago

The population numbers of other countries are only relevant when serving an imperial or colonial enterprise. In a way this article reads somewhat like a mob boss complaining that their accountant is skimming off the top.

If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make sure those numbers would never be accessible for westerners as it’s the fist thing you need to know when you decide to wage war of any kind against some people.

ReptileMan2• 6 months ago

Do you really think the outcome of western militaries vs nigeria will be different if Nigeria has a million or a billion people?

AreShoesFeet0004• 6 months ago

How else are you going to estimate the number of soldiers to send, the overall cost, and the projected return from labor exploitation? How do you think wars are waged and what do you think motivates them?

renewiltord• 6 months ago

Yeah, everyone thinks that “if I hide my stuff others won’t know my secret”. One innovation of the Western world is that public knowledge itself is valuable to the entire society. Why would they publish papers on transformers and so on? Are they fools? They’re giving away their secrets!

Why do they do these things? Because that is how they are as a society and this world currently rewards that more than it does the secret lab.

vladms2• 6 months ago

Quoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple."

That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.

If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.

jklinger4104• 6 months ago

Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.

I find the complication comes from poor definitions, poor understanding of those definitions, and pedantic arguments. Less about the facts of reality being complicated and more about our ability to communicate it to each other.

apercu• 6 months ago

I’ve noticed the inverse as in the more I understand something, the less “simple” it looks.

Apparent simplicity usually comes from weak definitions and overconfident summaries, not from the underlying system being easy.

Complexity is often there from the start, we just don’t see it yet.

nathan_compton2• 6 months ago

Haha.

evan_a_a• 6 months ago

This is a literary device. The article continues to explain why this isn’t a simple problem, and it’s clear from the conclusion that the author understands the complexity.

But it’s good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which raw numbers—like population counts, but also many others—are only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual construction of these numbers is important, because it encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility about the world: we really know much less than we think.

anal_reactor• 6 months ago

I guess this is why reading things other than technical documentation remains important.

vladms2• 6 months ago

I tried to check a list of literary devices (Wikipedia) and couldn't exactly map to a specific category - would be interesting to know if there such a category.

The problem I have with this literary device is that I think it works if most / many questions would fit it then he would go to disapprove it. Using it, for me, kind of indirectly reinforces the idea that "there are many simple answers". Which I came to loathe as it is pushed again and again due to social media. Everything is "clear", "simple", "everybody knows better", "everybody did their research".

How did this literal device make you feel? Interested? Curious? Bored? When I read it my initial instinct was "no, it's definitely not simple, so if that's what are you going to explain me, I will not bother".

PlatoIsADisease3• 6 months ago

As someone who reads epistemology for fun. Its so much worse than you know.

Everything is basically a theory only judged on predictive capabilities. Even the idea that Earth is not at the center of the solar system is a judgement call of what we define as the solar system and center.

The math is simpler sure, but its arbitrary how we define our systems.

leesec• 6 months ago

"It shouldn’t be new to anyone that population data in the poor world is bad" from the same author and same article. but cherry pick away if it makes you feel intelligent.

adamrezich• 6 months ago

Most people believe that most things are knowable, and happily defer to published statistics whenever possible.

bjourne• 6 months ago

Nitpickinging is a quaint obsession.

veunes3• 6 months ago

Not simple in the sense of easy, but simple in the sense of foundational: if a government can't even roughly say how many people it governs, everything built on top of that gets shaky

rayiner• 6 months ago

“The next census, in 1991, was by far the most credible, and it shocked many people by finding that the population was about 30 percent smaller than estimated. But even that one was riddled with fraud. Many states reported that every single household had exactly nine people.”

If I worked in the government of a country like this I’d just throw in the towel.

mrighele2• 6 months ago

If you worked in the government of such a country is probably because of nepotism and to get a salary that is both guaranteed and above average.

You are part of the system, so if the guy that gave you the job (and may fire you as easily) asks you to "make it so that the population is X millions" of course you do it.

detectivestory• 6 months ago

at that point you are pretty much "throwing in the towel"

merryocha• 6 months ago

I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.

Thlom2• 6 months ago

Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address. The last census was in 2001 and then there was also done a big job registering every residences in multi residence houses. The assumption is that we will never have to do a form based census ever again and just use central registries instead.

pixl9715• 6 months ago

That may or may not work depending on where you're at.

If for example you have poor compliance with the law then the law is mostly useless (in the US you do have to update your ID in 30 days, but huge numbers of people dont).

And that doesn't count if your country has a huge undocumented population, like some places in the US do.

carlosjobim5• 6 months ago

"Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?

And how long does it take for that central registry to be informed when somebody has emigrated from the country without informing the government? Five years? Ten?

pimlottc2• 6 months ago

That seems to assume that immigration and emigration is not a significant factor for your country

munificent2• 6 months ago

we just have every person registered in a central database from birth

"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!

A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9 months later regardless of her connection to any official social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted unknown new person.

To the degree that that doesn't happen, it's because a country has spent generations building a giant high trust society with good widely available medical infrastructure and a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good education, mobility, safety.

An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society and only in a few places in the recent past has any country reached it.

mr_toad5• 6 months ago

Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address.

Where is this magical land with no homeless people?

chneu2• 6 months ago

I used to do canvassing and yeah, I never believe official stats anymore.

Especially anything that's self reported or whatnot. People lie. People misunderstand questions. No process is perfect.

nitwit005• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon

Unfortunately, this extends to research studies. My mother enrolled me in the Growing Up Today Study (https://gutsweb.org/). I eventually stopped responding to that, as I couldn't see how any child (or even adult) could answer their questions on estimated food consumption remotely accurately, making the whole thing seeming dubiously ethical.

It's cited constantly in the research on ultra-processed food you see these days.

expedition322• 6 months ago

The Netherlands stopped with the census in the 1970s when computers became viable. You have to report each birth and death to your domicile. It's fairly foolproof because you can't do anything if you do not legally exist.

CGMthrowaway2• 6 months ago

It's somewhat common knowledge that China's population count has been inflated for some time now, perhaps by 100's of millions. Not hard to believe when you realize how much data out of China is very difficult to verify (like GDP for instance). Evidence typically cited to support this are discrepancies in birth data, reports of 350 million duplicate IDs and fertility rates likely lower than official estimates. It's also reasonable to conclude there are systemic incentives for local officials to exaggerate numbers.

There is a strange pro-China faction on HN that will downvote me for this comment (not that this comment is at all anti-China) However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.

0xTJ• 6 months ago

This particular topic is covered in the "Are there billions of fake people?" section of the linked article.

hearsathought4• 6 months ago

There is a strange pro-China faction on HN

There's an even stranger anti-China faction on HN.

However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.

Those same "honest" "economists" have been saying china was lying the other way. Did you know that people like you were saying "the ccp" was intentionally UNDERCOUNTING their population not so long ago? That china couldn't be trusted and china's real population was near 2 billion.

Strange people like you say shit like china is buying up all our real estate and then turn around and say china's economy is a fraud and they are about to go bankrupt? China's military is about to expand around the world and then say china's corrupt and they are a paper tiger?

Sometimes strange people like you contradict yourselves within the same thread. Strange.

kevin_thibedeau• 6 months ago

There are a lot of women who do not officially exist because of the one child policy. The CCP may or may not have a full account of their population.

CGMthrowaway2• 6 months ago

I did not know that. I know of no other "people like me." I have been following reports of China's population being overcounted for at least 25 years. Not sure I want to be introduced to these people you know, although I am open to considering their evidence.

torginus3• 6 months ago

This is the most ridiculous take. If I were pro/anti-US, It would be understood as an opinion on the domestic/foreign policy of current or past US administrations.

If I were pro-China, that would by this standard, mean that I refuse to believe unsubstantiated rumors and or didn't qualify every undeniably real Chinese achievement with either skepticism or 'at what cost'.

maxglute2• 6 months ago

"Credible" critics (as in least noncredible) i.e. YiFuxian undercount in <10% range, which comports with bureaucratic incentive to overcount before digitization when head count hard to track.

perhaps by 100's of millions

More than 10%, i.e. PRC actually only 800m-1000m (20-30% undercount) is when claims become statistically retarded. There's proxy indicators like PRC ag imports, especially animal feed (soybeans), if they were 100s of millions short then per capita caloric consumption reach biologically impossible levels (like 200 grams of protein / 5000 calories per capita) meanwhile key policy CCP (Xi personally) hammers is food security / wastage. This when demographic skepticism becomes unhinged.

TBH PRC over reporting pop, UNDER reporting GDP is sensible. PRC entire history has been trying to underreport GDP (specifically per capita gdp) using accounting methods to stay under high income status for development perks, literally since initial IMF negotiations to set PRC per capita baseline, PRC insisted on something like 50% lower than what IMF calculated. Of course the anti PRC faction won't accept the logical out come is that PRC that is much richer it claims, with less people than it claims, i.e. PRC per capita much higher than it claims only makes PRC system look stronger. Then factor in demographic income disparity (i.e. tertiary educated newer gen make multiples more) and realize as PRC demo phases out undereducated/unproductive elders in next few generations and PRC per capita is statistically locked into doubling/tripling. Then factor in PPP / potential future FX moves, i.e. PRC appreciating rmb is another multiplier on PRC per capita. Not many "honest" economist talks about how PRC is actually incentivized to look statistically weak (somehow people forgot about hide/bide when it comes to economy), because muh authoritarians like to look strong, leading to plenty of PRC doomer economists who keep being wrong.

Apocryphon3• 6 months ago

I downvoted you for preemptive self-proclaimed martyrdom, which is a grating way to post.

ecshafer• 6 months ago

I had a coworker who had lived in Nigeria, working for the oil companies, with some pretty crazy stories. Duffle bags full of money guarded by squads of guys with machine guns being a normal day to day practice in some parts of the business. Extreme poverty right next to country clubs for the oil company staff. It wouldn't surprise me that they are up or town tens of millions of people.

bombcar• 6 months ago

This was relatively common in the USA in living memory - before mass bank accounts and easy check depositing, payday would often involve large amounts of cash.

varjag4• 6 months ago

Poor methodology or even some bug in an Excel macro at the UN headquarters could well be a reason behind the sudden, synchronous decline of population in all cultures and political systems of this planet.

And like the article suggests it can be deliberate too. Am extremely skeptical of population figures in some parts of former Soviet Union. The official demographic loss figures in WW2 had tripled since 1945 but post-war census figures were never revised. That could easily account for the "demographic collapse" of 1990s.

pixl9715• 6 months ago

Population counts are parts of geopolitics.

If you're the neighbor of some country that has a number of natural resources you'd like to get a hold of then you want to do things like formulate battle plans. If you have to make a plan to conquer 10 million people, it's going to be a bit different than one for 5 million people. The 10 million one is going to take longer. And then when you figure out that country is using deception to bolster its population numbers you have to figure where they lied about these numbers. Is it everywhere, is it in the place you want to invade. Is the population actually higher where you want to invade but lower in the rest of the country. Now you have to invest in doing your own general population and capability counts to make sure you don't step 10 feet deep in a 2 foot deep pool.

johngossman4• 6 months ago

I doubt this explains the world-wide phenomenon, but regionally sure. I remember in the 90s when studies brought the Nigerian population estimates down this triggered a drop of growth forecasts across sub-Saharan Africa.

Edit: changed world-wife (which sounds interesting demographically) to world-wide

varjag4• 6 months ago

Sure, it is quite far-fetched. However it is extremely uncommon that we experience unified social trends all across the board, from liberal Finland or Japan to North Korea and Taliban-run Afghanistan. Usually there are odd reversals and exceptions here and there; not this time apparently. And we still lack a satisfying theory that could account for fertility decline in every country.

taeric• 6 months ago

Feels like this should dive into accuracy and precision? And for the next fun number to look into, try declared calories on food packaging.

Just don't fall into the trap of thinking you can't use these values if they are not perfectly accurate.

hybrid_study2• 6 months ago

The post leans too hard on “we have no idea.” Population numbers are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak census infrastructure, but that’s not the same as ignorance. Most countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them “fake” is misleading — it’s uneven data quality, not numerology. “Large uncertainty” ≠ “no idea.”

nostrebored• 6 months ago

Countries have incentives to manipulate population data. Most error that I’m aware of is not attributable to poor data quality. For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have a strong incentive to show population growth.

Muromec• 6 months ago

For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have a strong incentive to show population growth.

That's one source of bias that is present at a specific time. Mostly you would have competing incentives. There is usually more than one agency that runs does the counting. Vital records registration, voter rolls and tax payers lists, for example are separate agencies in some countries. Not every tax payer is a voter and not everyone who was born still lives in the country. The sources are sometimes cross-referenced too. Then there is usually a place that needs to do macroeconomic forecasting and needs to have some numbers to do it's job.

tscherno• 6 months ago

Agree. I feel that it is beneficial to present yourself larger than you really are.

ekianjo2• 6 months ago

Not just that. Poorer countries inflate their numbers so they can get more financial aid

autoexec• 6 months ago

I doubt places where the data is poor like Somalia or Afghanistan are making up their numbers because of a real estate bubble

ekianjo2• 6 months ago

Births and deaths are not recorded in many places

pfdietz• 6 months ago

I remember the study of people who live to very old age found that the frequency of such people is most correlated with lack of birth records.

simonw• 6 months ago

The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which by most estimates has the fourth-largest population in Africa, has not conducted a census since 1984. Neither South Sudan nor Eritrea, two of the newest states in Africa (one created in 2011 and the other in 1991), has conducted a census in their entire history as independent states. Afghanistan has not had one since 1979; Chad since 1991; Somalia since 1975.

hybrid_study2• 6 months ago

Two countries, ranking 32nd and 41st in Africa have not had a census. Those others have had old census conducted: so we have "some idea" of their population.

johngossman4• 6 months ago

You are conflating known and unknown unknowns, otherwise known as Knightian uncertainty. As the article says, many countries have not run censuses in many years and/or manipulate the numbers.

StopDisinfo9102• 6 months ago

I think you are missing one of the key point of the article. Some census are indeed fake, as in falsified not as in uncertain, because population is used to allocate resources and as a proxy for power and there is therefore a strong interest in falsifying them.

That's why somme statistics look weird. That's also why things heavily relying on demographic data need to be question. It's particularly significant when it comes to green house gas emissions for example and climate modeling.

hugh-avherald2• 6 months ago

I think "no idea" is an entirely reasonable summary of the magnitude of the uncertainty.

Dylan168077• 6 months ago

To me, "no idea" suggests the number is likely off by an order of magnitude or more, and even the worst case country in this article was less than 2x with bigger countries having better numbers.

627467• 6 months ago

And yet... The examples mentioned and the justifications for big errors/fakes in many countries (that historically have been highlighted for scares around overpopulation) are very plausible. "Most countries run census" is not the same as "most countries run mostly reliable census" or "most of the world population is covered by a reliable census".

Aren't there plenty of incentives for over expressing population numbers in many countries, specially in underdeveloped ones?

numpad0• 6 months ago

There are growing sentimental, denialist, conspiracy, narratives on social media that anything that paint US being out of proportion has to be fake. It's up there with flat earths and "birds don't exist" theories. From the article...

  > The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.

This isn't the first time I had encountered this specific type of ... char arrays. I think the major part of the author's intent is to just vent.

Animats• 6 months ago

Worldwide, there are over 5 billion smartphones.[1] Yes, some people have more than one. They have to connect to the network, so there's a constant census of cellphones.

[1] https://electroiq.com/stats/smartphones-statistics/

porridgeraisin• 6 months ago

This comment is LLM generated.

veunes3• 6 months ago

I think you're right in principle, but the article is pointing at a slightly different failure mode than just "wide error bars"

postsantum5• 6 months ago

Link is dead but I think the population number of DRC (Congo) can't be right

Look at the size of the country (around 1/3 of USA) and the number of people living there (112M according to wikipedia), also 1/3 of USA. So the density should be about the same but when you look at satellite photos it's one giant city (18M), several smaller cities and the endless forest. Can it support other 90M people?

rjrjrjrj• 6 months ago

"one giant city, several smaller cities, and the endless forest"

Doesn't that describe many US states? (although sometimes desert/plains/etc instead of forest)

pixl9715• 6 months ago

Um, you ever look into the size of Japan versus it's population ratio to the US? Tokyo is only twice as big as the giant city you're talking about, but the country itself is like 1/20th the size of the US.

So yea, DRC can easily be like that. Especially if they don't subscribe to 4-6 people living in a house thing that the US does.

postsantum5• 6 months ago

Take a look at the neighboring Uganda. Most of the country is covered by cultivated fields, roads, villages. Sure, population density is higher but it's not even comparable with emptiness of DRC

KptMarchewa• 6 months ago

Even the capital does not look large enough. Brazzaville on the next side of the river is apparently 2 million, and Kinshasa definitely does not look 9x larger.

pibaker• 6 months ago

Look more carefully into the rural areas of DRC and you will see little huts and hamlets everywhere, even in the jungles there are clearings clearly inhabited by human. There are also larger towns scattered around that appears to be yellow, earthy spots on the landscape but if you zoom in you can see its houses. Each of these houses can likely house an entire family.

Also keep in mind the US is very sparsely populated after all. You can easily drive hours in parts of the western US (never mind the parts you cannot even drive through, or Alaska) without encountering a single human settlement.

chneu2• 6 months ago

I drove for almost an hour last night in Oregon without seeing another car. This was on a highway at 10pm not far from a city of 60K.

People forget how rural the US can be.

johngossman4• 6 months ago

Go look at Bangladesh (or the whole Ganges valley). Extremely dense population outside of urban cores. Tiny area compared to the US but a lot of people...maybe 500 million between India and Bangladesh.

postsantum5• 6 months ago

Just checked, Bangladesh has almost no unused land. Please take a look at google maps

abhinavk• 6 months ago

Bangladesh has one of the most fertile lands on earth producing rice (which can feed 5x people wheat does), no desert and a little bit of mountains (hills actually). Gangetic Plains are also in Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. These places are not comparable to anywhere in the world sans East China.

zadkey• 6 months ago

I don't trust China's population numbers at all. Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.

If anything their total population went down during one child policy.

3rodents2• 6 months ago

The one child policy only really mattered in the cities, rural China had different rules. There is also no incentive for China to lie, quite the opposite, underreporting their population would be a boon for their success on the global stage: imagine if they are achieving what they achieve, with half as many people?

empressplay3• 6 months ago

Yes, except that China also uses its population as a military threat. It going down would take away some of the impact of that. So it always needs to go up, to reinforce it.

IcyWindows• 6 months ago

Many companies setup branches and sent IP to China in exchange for access to those billion consumers. Fewer consumers means a company might target India, etc. instead of China first.

sapiogram• 6 months ago

Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing.

Even if I take your numbers at face value, it is absolutely possible for this math to math. To simplify massively, if the average person dies at 80 years old, the population growth today depends on the number of births 80 years ago, compared to today. Not 30 years ago. The population may have grown massively between 30 and 80 years ago, so that the absolute number of births remains high, despite a low birth rate.

pixl9715• 6 months ago

Yep, people don't understand moving averages with a wide range. The old population getting older massively changes demographics. You start looking like Japan where a huge portion of the population is above retirement age.

And this fits for China where the standard of living has massively increased. What would throw off most Americans is that in 1962 the average life expectancy in China was only 50 years old, and has increased to roughly 78 today. 28 additional years of life is huge and it was so rapid that it would create a massive increase in population.

This also reverses causality on the one child population rule. They didn't add the rule because their population was huge at the time, it was added because increased life expectancy with nothing else would have increased their population now to something like 1.7 to 2 billion.

snowwrestler• 6 months ago

And inverse is also true, so that China’s population is currently shrinking and aging, despite the “1 child” policy being abandoned a decade ago.

sct202• 6 months ago

Just to put some numbers into perspective. China and Europe have roughly the same amount of land, and Europe has a population of 744m (vs your est of <800m for China). So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

wasabi991011• 6 months ago

So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of population when China seems way more overcrowded.

Different population distributions. In particular, the population of China is concentrated in the eastern half of the country, with very few people living in the western half. Contrast to Europe, which from what I understand is more evenly spread out.

jjk1668• 6 months ago

The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum

throw5t4346• 6 months ago

When I went to China for work, over half the people I met there had siblings. So I really wonder how effective the one child policy was. And these are people in their 30-40s.

maeln• 6 months ago

Lebanon has had no official census since ... 1932. Since the constitution distribute the power based on religion, any census that would mention religion might put into question the current distribution. In a country already plagued with religious conflict, this is less than ideal. You could make a secular census, but that might also reveal the extent of the population who is leaving Lebanon. So the Lebanese governments and political elites have done what they do best : Absolutely nothing (while stealing as much money as possible).

It is both funny and sad that we have more accurate number of the size of the Lebanese diaspora than the actual number of people living in Lebanon.

seszett• 6 months ago

Since the constitution distribute the power based on religion, any census that would mention religion might put into question the current distribution.

Funny how similar it is to Belgium's situation, the "language border" was established through census and then was revised as few times with census results, but since not everyone was happy with it it was essentially fixed and stopped being revised.

Today it's which side of the border you live in that determines which language you officially "speak".

thunderbong• 6 months ago

The main tweet the article is referring to

https://x.com/BonesawMD/status/2010343792126128535

pimlottc2• 6 months ago

Thanks for this, I assumed there would be some more rigor behind this but it hardly seems credible, it relies mostly on anecdotes and "common sense".

Supermancho• 6 months ago

Actually faking the existence of billions of people would require a global conspiracy orders of magnitude more complex than anything in human history...

This is wildly incorrect and is intentionally narrow minded - obvious by the end of the paragraph. All there has to be is financial incentive. There were multiple, for decades. Aligned incentives are far more effective than coordinated deception. Ofc this assertion comes right after acknowledging that an island nation literally miscounted by HALF. I'm not sure there's anything in this blog post worth remembering. It seems ill-considered.

torginus3• 6 months ago

This sounds very conspiracy-y. I'm sure there are metrics like consumption of certain items like food, medicine, etc. which is at a mostly consistent level accross subsections the human population. Like arthiris medication, foodstuffs, diapers etc.

It would take a very involved conspiracy to make these numbers fall in line with where they should be given a certain pop cap, and I'm not sure what would be the benefit.

Like all conspiracy theories, if it requires a coordination of large unrelated organizations over long timeframes, which seems impossible even over the table, its almost certainly fake.

Like you can fake census data, but not how many cans of beans does a US-headquartered supermarket chain sells.

empressplay3• 6 months ago

You don't need a conspiracy, you just need the right incentives (aid) and the rules (freely available). People are going to independently figure out how to game the system.

Then there's also Occam: if you're a poor nation and you'll get more foreign aid if you inflate your population, you will inflate your population, full stop.

pixl9715• 6 months ago

There are a few particular problems with this, and that is you're thinking like a first worlder.

What we consider developing nations can quite often just go without these items. Economies in these countries can have rapid swings that cause massive changes in consumption. Shortages of medicines in one year can massively increase child deaths in the first year, where as the next 5 years don't have an issue with that.

With the last one, maybe there is a tik-tok trend that makes beans popular for a year, and then it dies out and half as many beans are consumed. This also isn't counting the average calorie consumption in a country. 10 cans of beans in the US might feed 20-30 people in another country when supplemented from locally grown items.

Shit's hard, yo.

jjk1668• 6 months ago

Fake is generally the wrong word. Inaccurate would be much more appropriate. Every population estimate is just that. There is going to be error. The error may be small or large, and it may be biased in one direction or another, but there is a clear chain from data to result. Even if your data sources are fraudulent, if you're making any attempt to account for that, though you may not do a very good job, it's still just inaccuracy. Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number. This may actually happen in a few cases, but the claim that it's widespread is both hard to believe and unsupported by this article.

crazygringo7• 6 months ago

Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number.

That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea. And it describes why states in Nigeria have such a strong incentive to fake their population numbers, that it's impossible to achieve an accurate national total.

I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.

observationist2• 6 months ago

Any country where there's no robust free press and legal protections for things like criticizing the government is lying about nearly everything, in the direction where the government feels it is advantageous to lie. If they feel they get a benefit from inflating population, they will inflate population, and it won't be subtle. The WHO and other international organizations are not legitimate sources of information; they take direction from their host countries and report numbers as directed.

If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.

If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda. This is human nature, whether it stems from abuse of power or wanting to tell a story that's aspirational or from blatant incompetence or corruption.

Population numbers fall under the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" umbrella.

Braxton19805• 6 months ago

How is a strong incentive alone evidence of wrongdoing?

jjk1668• 6 months ago

That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea.

No it doesn't. It says the UN came up with a different estimate, which the UN wound up not adopting. There is no evidence that the UN estimate actually used better methods.

I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.

I am strictly arguing against "a lot" being fake, and specifically that an isolated example is not evidence of "a lot."

mr_toad5• 6 months ago

I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.

The headline is more fake than the numbers are.

matt-p• 6 months ago

Incentives (for western Governments) are strong to show population has grown as little as possible, because it reduces stats on (mostly illegal) immigration, and improves GDP-per capita. I think it is probably healthy to explore if these incentives leak into the data that Governments produce. Probably to some extent it does, to be frank, even if that extent is just not looking too closely at passive measurements like food purchase trends or similar.

Marsymars• 6 months ago

Incentives (for western Governments) are strong to show population has grown as little as possible

Well, for some people - there's a notable tranche of people who are sounding the alarm bells about the demographic problems of low birth rates and an aging population leading to ever-fewer workers being squeezed by an ever-growing cohort of retirees who are hoarding wealth and real estate.

mr_toad5• 6 months ago

and improves GDP-per capita.

This is amusing. If you think population numbers are fake you absolutely do not want to see how they come up with GDP estimates.

darth_avocado• 6 months ago

Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number

Fake simply means not genuine. It doesn’t require the people reporting it to have a real estimate. It simply requires the people reporting it to just not try finding the real number.

dataflow• 6 months ago

Not even that. If I give you a fake number (by whatever definition) and you report it... the number is still fake, regardless of whether you had any inkling it might be, or whether you tried to verify it in any way.

I'm trying to think of a definition, and the best I can come up with is this: fake means the number was modified at some point without an auditable trail. For example, if I see 1 deer on a sq km and I extrapolate linearly to a 100 sq km area that there are 100 deer in that area, then the number is fake if I don't disclose the extrapolation -- and this is true even if the actual number is in fact 100 in reality.

Actually, I don't even think this covers all the bases, because it assumes there was an initially factual measurement. For example, if it that one observed deer was in fact a statue, the numbers are all fake even if everyone documented everything and acted in good faith and accidentally came up with true correct number at the end...

jjk1668• 6 months ago

How can any estimate, even a very poor estimate, be not genuine if there isn't a known better estimate? If I estimate there are 8 alien civilizations in the milky way it may be a truly terrible estimate, and the methods by which I came up with that estimate (eg one per galactic arm) may not stand up to any rigorous scrutiny, but it's as genuine an estimate as any other. To be not genuine, there must be something that is genuine, which it is not.

You don't need to necessarily know the right answer to have a fake estimate, but you have to be doing something to the estimate that you know is making it worse, which is equivalent to having the estimate where you didn't do that, which would be better.

itsamario• 6 months ago

I remember hearing that NYC had millions of commuters a day via NJTransit.

I took those trains for a decade and the math doesnt add up. The capacity of the carts and speed they operate through the tunnel suggests less than a million at most.

zipy124• 6 months ago

No it adds up. The latest data [0] shows an average of 3.7 million a day on the subway. For comparison London on the underground has about 2.6 million a day [1]. Given the size of the cities and surrounding areas compared, these numbers seem reasonable. Are you to believe that all these public transport companies are all in some global scheme to fudge their numbers to similar magnitudes? The MTR in hong kong similarly reports 4.45 million a day [2], a similar amount. I'd wager a guess you'd see similar in Paris, Tokyo etc...

[0] https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...

[1] https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-2025-consolidate...

[2] https://www.mtr.com.hk/archive/corporate/en/investor/annual2...

cptaj• 6 months ago

Every election would have to be fake. Every government database would have to be full of fake names. And all for what? To get one over on the dumb Westerners?

While I agree that the claim that world population is under 1 billion is bonkers, I also think he grossly underestimates how frequent and large the fraud is.

Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people. This is not recognized by the venezuelan government and is not reflected in any of the stats pages you can find.

That's a 20-30% difference in the real vs reported population of the country.

And yes. They do fake the elections.

pixl9715• 6 months ago

world population is under 1 billion is bonkers,

Yea, that would leave the US and Japan with about half the world population assuming our counts are even close to correct.

e44858• 6 months ago

assuming our counts are even close to correct.

That's a bold assumption. States get more representatives if they inflate the population count: https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-ap...

MYEUHD2• 6 months ago

Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people.

Huh? Chavismo began in 1999. So if you're claiming that chavismo caused a lot of migration, you'd need to come up with data that correlates with that time period.

The reality is, the big migrations from Venezuela began in 2017, which correlates with the very harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela, which caused a hyper-inflation that lasted too long.

It has nothing to do with Chavismo and everything to do with American economic terrorism.

sien• 6 months ago

Not according to wikipedia :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_refugee_crisis

In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999.[30] Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.[31]

Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt[32] and after Chávez's re-election in 2006.[32][33] In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president.[2] According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.[15]

The Venezuelan refugee crisis has a lot to do with Chavismo.

basurazurdos• 6 months ago

another poster accusing US of terrorism and exhonerating a murdering dictator

truly HN approved content

hbarka• 6 months ago

Data quality is always going to be an issue. In this case the reporting is based on an honor system. I imagine extrapolation using satellite imagery and mathematics on people mobility would be good for validation and correlation.

pixl9715• 6 months ago

Sat imagery, understanding average household size, knowing average calorie consumption vs what can be grown on the ground, knowing imports of particular products, etc.

For example you couldn't use the same algorithm that you would on US or Japan as you would on a non-developed/developing country, you'd get nonsensical numbers.

Anonyneko• 6 months ago

The latest population census in Russia was executed so horribly that demographics experts still rely on the 2010 and earlier ones to figure out the approximate population number (the difference between estimations is in ~10 million range). Of course the whole war, relocation, and undocumented immigration things aren't making things any easier.

Much easier to calculate population numbers in countries with a population register, but those are usually smaller countries like those in the Nordics. I don't think censuses are even held around here...?

samus• 6 months ago

Those rely on a strong centralized government that can somehow penalize people for not keeping records up to date. Not necessarily by direct checks, but maybe via inconveniences caused by inaccuracies. They are probably using other data (aggregate statistics from health system, tax records, social services) to conduct cross checks.

A few years back in Austria there was a small scandal as a newly introduced government app to notify about changing residence was used by a member of parliament to declare they moved into the Parliament.

jl6• 6 months ago

Dead Internet theory, meet Dead Earth theory. There are actually only 87 people in the world, and they’ve made up the rest as part of a welfare scam.

jrm4• 6 months ago

Interesting idea (confession, I can't get to the article)

Regardless, I live in a place that, according to the magazines and blogs, has a very high level of crime. I don't actually believe it does.

One sort of confirmation of this. One study I saw was counting crimes that happened here per population -- but the college students were not counted in the population; and this was a time where yeah, e.g. college students stealing each others TV's and or getting in fights etc, was prevalent.

827a• 6 months ago

My favorite conspiracy theory I've heard gain surprising traction in some circles is that the world population is closer to 5B, not 8B. I think the theory goes that there's so much miscounting in third-world countries, combined with perverse incentives at every level to seem bigger than you actually are in second-world countries, that the final =SUM(B1:B195) Excel formula "they" run to get the world population is based on so many nested and poorly reported =SUM() formulas that the number is far more inaccurate than just "slightly".

dzonga• 6 months ago

the author thinks the inaccurate population numbers are just an African / 3rd world phenomenon - where dodgy officials inflate | understate numbers due to corruption etc

same mistake - westerners keep on making - mostly of the liberal kind when they don't want to face reality.

all countries have the same problem - whether developed | high trusting | low trusting or not.

observe what happens during elections - now suddenly a rural village it could be in bumwhat Alabama or middle of nowhere Africa - numbers are suddenly inflated -

same thing happens during humanitarian disasters - Side A accuses Side B of atrocities - then side A says XX number of people were killed | displaced - later on down the years we find out Side A made up the number the people would not have up x hell not even large X.

it's just human nature - lie, deceive and make up reality!!

blaufuchs2• 6 months ago

Did I miss something here? Or is Bonesaw just completely trolling?

The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.

Even if we assume Bonesaw is correct and China has 500M people, India has 300M people in the cities and 0 rural population... that's only 200M left to reach 1B between all of the Americas/Europe/Africa and the rest of Asia.

indoordin0saur• 6 months ago

Maybe he's trolling, maybe he's a schizo or a conspiracy theorist. Regardless, the author thinks (as do I) that this is obviously ridiculous.

blaufuchs2• 6 months ago

Yeah I should have been clear that I'm disagreeing with Bonesaw and not the author here, whose article I enjoyed. I was just genuinely confused how one could add "500M + 300M + rest of world" and arrive at "significantly <1B", but I haven't been on Xitter in a minute now.

flerchin• 6 months ago

Was that a mistranslation, and instead the meaning is that the true population is 1 billion fewer than the generally accepted ~8 billion people? So more like 7 billion?

markstos• 6 months ago

My city of Bloomington appears to have almost a third of the population living in poverty according to the US Census, but you'd have a tough time seeing that if you drove through.

What we have is a large university with almost half the population being college students.

https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1805860-bloomingt...

mr_toad5• 6 months ago

Poverty is often defined as having an income less than 1/3 of the median. The median household income in the US is about $80,000 p/a, so poor would be about $26,000. You might well have a tough time seeing that from the outside.

vgivanovic• 6 months ago

Actually faking the existence of billions of people would require a global conspiracy orders of magnitude more complex than anything in human history.

No true. All that is required is for incentives to be roughly aligned for people to tend in a similar direction.

dwd• 6 months ago

Which is the case for pretty much all conspiracies. Collusion or communication is generally unnecessary when each participant is acting in their own best interest.

Apocryphon3• 6 months ago

But then that presumes that the incentives are universally beneficial for all to partake in, and that the players won't simply prisoner's dilemma their way out of it. For instance, wouldn't the wealthier nations be incentivized to downplay population figures in order to minimize their foreign aid payments?

mannyv• 6 months ago

Lot of data is "fake."

I remember my political economy prof talking about when he was in the Prime Minister's office of some African country and they were "estimating" the GDP numbers for the OECD.

Collecting statistics is hard when your basic systems don't function well and there are plenty of incentives for "optimistic projections." And in many countries statistics collection doesn't occur or are inaccurate because cheating is rampant. I mean, why tell the government your income when they're just going to tax you on it?

You can see that in the US' import values. Everyone who imports knows that you can ask the shipper to fudge the invoiced amounts so the importer pays less in customs fees/taxes. The assumption by the statistics people is that it all "averages out." But they have no way to prove that assumption. And it's well known that transfer pricing is a total fantasy.

So - lots of numbers are fake. In the West fewer numbers are fake, probably.

sixsevenrot• 6 months ago

In March 1937, the four main statistical professionals working on the Census in TsUNKhU – the chief of the Sector for Population, Mikhail Kurman; chief of the Census Bureau, Olimpiy Kvitkin; his deputy, Lazar Brand; and the chief of the Sector for transportation and communication, Ivan Oblomov, were arrested and imprisoned. Soon they were joined by the Chief of TsUNKhU, Ivan Kraval, and the chiefs of most of the regional statistical centers, and executions followed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Soviet_census

robinhood• 6 months ago

Such an interesting article. Thanks for sharing it. Nothing interesting to say apart from this. I'll sleep less stupid tonight.

rossdavidh• 6 months ago

What are the incentives to either pretend you have more people in your household than you do, or pretend you have more people in your city/region/country than you do?

What are the incentives to get it right?

Given the balance of incentives, it seems breathtakingly naive to think that we are within a few percent of the real population. The incentives (different, but present, in both rich and poor countries) are greatly mismatched.

The problem is likely much worse than the writer of this article believes.

newsclues• 6 months ago

As much as I hate it, but digital identity is a solution for poor demographic data.

And digital identity and authentication seems to be a very important service, should it be in the hands of corporations or governments?

TaoWay• 6 months ago

A lot of projection numbers on populations are inflated too.

lurker919• 6 months ago

Can't we just do a count(*) on the number of unique mobile numbers in every country? And add some estimate for children etc.

Beijinger• 6 months ago

LOL. Did you read the article? Dude, many of these people don't have electricity.

vondur• 6 months ago

I believe the idea that China’s population was overestimated came out of the COVID vaccine rollout. Supposedly, the central government asked local officials how many doses they needed and then sent money based on those numbers. That gave some people an incentive to inflate the figures to get more funding. Later on, when the government looked at school enrollment numbers, they noticed there were way fewer kids than the number of vaccine doses that had been requested for children.

maxglute2• 6 months ago

Yi Fuxian claim gov data showed 140m children were vaxed but there were only 110m kids registered in school, suggesting 30m fake/shadow kids. But school registration does not include 40m kindergartners... which syncs up to 140 gov claim.

nephihaha2• 6 months ago

Census problems are not just in developing countries. I know that here in Scotland, the last census was incomplete because they tried to make it entirely electronic and hundreds of thousands never replied.

Some anarchist types don't like giving the government info on themselves either, especially when there is evidence that census data is sometimes put to commercial use.

readthenotes1• 6 months ago

"So we can dismiss Bonesaw’s claim pretty easily. But,... we simply have no idea how many people live in many of the world’s countries."

Stopped reading here. The author claims magical knowledge and deep ignorance at the same time.

Apocryphon3• 6 months ago

Ironically, you seem to be doing the same to him.

hyruo• 6 months ago

I happened to have participated in census work before. For instance, in a country like China, the national census conducted every ten years generally yields accurate overall data, but the data for individual regions is indeed based on estimates. There are several reasons for this:

1. Population Mobility: Generally speaking, in economically developed areas, population figures are often underestimated because a large number of people freely migrate into these regions, and local governments are actually unclear about the exact increase in population. In contrast, in less economically developed areas, population figures are often overestimated because many people leave to work in cities, only returning to their hometowns for brief periods each year.

2. Mortality Data: China’s birth data is already quite accurate. Nowadays, the vast majority of babies are born in hospitals, unlike decades ago when midwives would come to homes to assist with deliveries. Moreover, birth certificates must be issued immediately after a baby is born. However, China’s mortality data is not precise, primarily because burials are still common in many rural areas, and these death records are often delayed.

For example, my city conducted multiple rounds of mass COVID-19 testing in 2021. Each time, more than 4.4 million people were tested, but our small city's 2020 census results only showed a population of 3.7 million.

mschild• 6 months ago

our small city 3.7 million

China's and India's population numbers always boggle my mind.

Made several friends during my master that were from China. One of them was from Shenyang. Never heard the name before and I'm usually pretty decent with geography. Around 8m inhabitants. Not even in the top 10 population wise. There isnt a single city in the 100 largest cities in China that is below 1m.

dumb12243• 6 months ago

It's a common source of confusion. The administrative definition of a 'city' is the equivalent of its metropolitan area + all satelite 'towns' and their suburbs (including farm lands).

My hometown has a population of 3.4 million (prefecture level city or 3rd tier as people call it). But it has an area about 6000 km^2, easily reaching the total size of London. At its core the central town has roughly a population of 700,000. And there are 4 more towns after the central one, each has smaller villages and suburbs under them. People living in these towns wouldn't consider they are living in the same city.

doix• 6 months ago

It's interesting that China does not have exact data. Don't they require everyone to register their address? I know foreigners must do it, and chatting with the locals they told me they were registered as well.

I would have imagined that the data could be used to get mostly accurate numbers.

kqr3• 6 months ago

Even if they required it that's no guarantee people actually do it. I have lived for a couple of years at an address different than the one I was registered at. Illegal in my country, but easy to conceal. (I had to because the apartment I lived in didn't strictly allow people of my sort to permanently reside in it.)

GCA10• 6 months ago

Ah, it would have been nice to get OP's perspective on Russian population counts. They've stayed remarkable stable at 144 million for two decades, even though the fertility rate has been long reported at way below the 2.1 that's considered stabilizing. And I don't think Russia is attracting a lot of inward migration.

shushpanchik2• 6 months ago

It actually does - migration from central asian ex-USSR republics was and is massive.

timschmidt2• 6 months ago

And they've recently chewed through > 1 million young men: https://www.dw.com/en/12-million-russian-soldiers-killed-inj...

shushpanchik2• 6 months ago

Have you read the article? It's casualties, which includes wounded. Article mentions that about 100-140k are killed, not >1m

tpm2• 6 months ago

My intuition is that their official numbers are cooked. Factors that influence the numbers:

- after 2014 the official numbers include the annexed parts of Ukraine

- since 1992 the natural change is negative (with a small interval around zero in 2013-2015), yet the total population was 148 million then and is 146 million now?

- there is some migration but officialy not enough to replace the decline of natural change ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Russia ). The numbers just don't add up, and that's not even counting emigration.

I haven't actually found any credible estimate what the 'true' numbers could be.

dkga• 6 months ago

The (excellent!) economist Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde is conducting excellent work on this, uncovering a lot of inconsistencies in population counts.

OhMeadhbh• 6 months ago

Oh man. I remember this time several years ago when my feudal lord was put in charge of this desert planet. Horrible place. Dry. Hot. Big local worm fauna that would bite you in half. The locals were a bit stand-offish, but solid in a fight and somewhat friendly once you got to know them. The local imperial rep kept telling me how few of the locals lived in the outer desert. Not many. Just a few.

For reasons I can't remember, I decided to go on a camping trip out in the deep desert. I had made friends with some of the locals and I guess I figured it would be a good way to get to know the local culture.

I met a few of the townies out on the desert rocks. And then a few more. Eventually I realized I had met a lot more. There were A LOT more locals than the imperial rep was telling people.

A lot of population numbers are fake. Amen, brother.

kqr3• 6 months ago

This was a point Deming often emphasised: there is no true population count in a country. What we call "the population count" is really just whatever number falls out of the method we have chosen to perform the count.

For any counting exercise of middling complexity there are multiple methods to perform it that will generate different numbers. There's not one way to count even lecture attendees!

A count is always objective. It's fine to disagree with the method used, but one can't just say the number is wrong and not propose a better method.

mbf1• 6 months ago

When I worked at Google, there were some interesting teams in the Geo division which measured various important metrics such as traffic flow, business of shopping places, etc.

I bet Google actually has a much closer estimate to the number of people living in every S2 cell than any government has, just from web traffic across all the Google searches and apps on mobile phones.

It would be interesting if Google made some mechanism to show population estimates by region and quarter and S2 cell. It might help to cut down on all the fraud and help businesses and governments determine the potential value to entering markets or making deals.

yanhangyhy• 6 months ago

i was going to say there are so many VIDEOS or disccuion around china's, saying china only have 6-7 B not 10 B not 14 B people...ok the comments already started this..

padjo• 6 months ago

I've seen the narrative that population estimates are wildly wrong on the high side become more popular in the last few years. It's hard not to think it's yet more enabling work for creeping fascism.

To be clear, the linked article is actually quite balanced apart from the click bait headline, I'm talking about the sort of thing it references from Twitter.

modo_mario• 6 months ago

Wasn't the UK recently shown to be wildly off wrt it's numbers of people leaving the country? From 77,000 to 257,000 at some point

ap99• 6 months ago

There are two competing incentives for census data.

1) Government wants to know its own population so it knows how much tax revenue to expect.

2) Government wants to appear larger to appear stronger to both enemies and friends.

veunes3• 6 months ago

Yet a lot of the global dashboards we argue over are built on numbers that might be wrong by tens of millions, and we rarely stop to ask how those numbers were actually produced

naveen99• 6 months ago

But we know how many cell phones, vehicles are in the world…

genericacct• 6 months ago

Some "developed" countries are not much better in that regard

TristanBall• 6 months ago

I suspect Digicel's marketing dept could give you the realtime PNG population to 6 decimal places.

Joking obviously, but only just.

orbisvicis• 6 months ago

Why does meta care how many kids a country has?

stevenjgarner3• 6 months ago

Here’s my favorite fact: Papua New Guinea, with about 0.1 percent of the world’s population, hosts more than 10 percent of the world’s languages. Two villages, separated perhaps only by a few miles, will speak languages that are not mutually intelligible.

In the author's example of PNG, dare I ask "why does it matter what the population is"? If the bulk of the people are living their own lives beyond "civilization", speaking unknown languages, without the government providing any kind of infrastructure or services, then why is it important how many people there are?

stevenjgarner3• 6 months ago

Even in the USA, the census is not as accurate as it thinks (without even getting into the homeless situation). South Dakota is the capital of the "Nomad" phenomenon because of its favorable residency and tax laws for full-time travelers (RVers and truckers) - such that residency is legal from a PO Box.

The US Census is "de jure" (based on where you live and sleep most of the time), not where your mail goes, so the SD nomad population can go uncounted. The Census Bureau generally does not mail forms to PO Boxes. They use a Master Address File (MAF) based on physical residential structures. If you are an RV'er and you were at a campsite in Arizona on Census Day (April 1st), you were technically supposed to be counted there, not in South Dakota. Many truckers are "transient" and difficult for the Bureau's "Non-Response Follow-Up" (the people who knock on doors) to catch.

Many are not counted. This creates a fascinating paradox: South Dakota has a high number of legal residents (on paper/licenses) but a lower enumerated population (on the Census). South Dakota might have enough "licensed residents" to clog their DMV and insurance systems, but because those people weren't "counted" in the physical state during the Census, the state doesn't get the federal highway or healthcare dollars to support the infrastructure they use when they do pass through.

It’s a bizarre irony: In PNG, the government "invents" people (overcounting) to get more aid; in South Dakota, the system "loses" people (undercounting) because the administrative tools (physical addresses) don't match the modern lifestyle.

tmp10423288442• 6 months ago

South Dakota would probably pursue this a little more if they were close to the threshold of getting another US Representative, but I can't imagine they have over 100,000 nomads that aren't being counted as South Dakota residents, which is the order of magnitude that would be needed to even be in the ballpark to get another seat.

stevenjgarner3• 6 months ago

Agreed. However, the 2020 Census had a reported "net coverage error" of only about -0.24%, which I seriously question in the case of SD.

A lot of population numbers are fake

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