A lot of population numbers are fake
davidoks.blog313 points by bookofjoe 17 hours ago
313 points by bookofjoe 17 hours 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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.”
> 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.
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.
Given their tumultuous history, the population of these countries may have halved, or doubled, since the last census.
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.
>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.
I doubt places where the data is poor like Somalia or Afghanistan are making up their numbers because of a real estate bubble
There are many other incentives, such as cities getting funding from the state proportional to their population.
Agree. I feel that it is beneficial to present yourself larger than you really are.
King Louis XIV lost a bunch of his land to astronomers able to more accurately measure said land. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you want to turn your country into a world leader in science.
The first rule in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Not just that. Poorer countries inflate their numbers so they can get more financial aid
Do you have specific examples?
This study published in Nature [0] says that rural populations in particular are typically UNDERCOUNTED (exactly like the Papa New Guinea in the OP's article), and that this happens at similar rates across poorer and wealthier countries: "no clear effect of country income on the accuracies of the five datasets can be observed."
I think "no idea" is an entirely reasonable summary of the magnitude of the uncertainty.
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.
That might be true in measuring abstract absolutes. But I'd agree that if you don't even know if your population is larger or smaller than it was 40 years ago, then it's perfectly fair to say that you have "no idea" what's going on.
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.
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?
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.
Births and deaths are not recorded in many places
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess this is why reading things other than technical documentation remains important.
Or it's a reason why literary devices should only be employed when they aren't distractingly wrong.
or to not jump to conclusions from reading a single sentence of a multi page article
I guess dune should be totally different given how distractingly wrong it is…
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.
I remember a lot of pop sci being centered around "elegance", looking for simple models that are broadly predictive. Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Darwin. Feels like people are leaning the other way now, and seeing reality as messy, uncertain, and multifaceted.
A case study of myself as an overeager math student:
I used to focus so much on finding "elegant" proofs of things, especially geometric proofs. I'd construct elaborate diagrams to find an intuitive explanation, sometimes disregarding gaps in logic.
Then I gave up, and now I appreciate the brutal pragmatism of using Euler's formula for anything trigonometry-related. It's not a very elegant method, if accounting for the large quantity of rote intermediate work produced, but it's far more effective and straightforward for dealing with messy trig problems.
Just cause knowledge can be reduced to predictive capabilities and judgement calls does not mean systems are defined arbitrarily. Everything is defined as to its relative function in/to society and our material endeavors and the social forces that limit or expand on areas of these systems.
First we have to live. That has implications; it's the base for all knowledge.
Knowledge is developing all the time and can be uncertain, sure, but the foundations aren't arbitrary.
You are doing an idealism.
You lost me with your example. What could the word center mean if the thing that all the other things orbit around in the solar system is not referred to as being in the center?
Orbits are influenced by gravity and momentum and are always changing as the objects pull on each other and are pulled on. It only appears to be stable because the scale is so immense and our lives are so short in comparison.
Barycenter is a good candidate, and apparently it's often outside of the Sun[0].
[0] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40782/where-is...
Slightly outside the sun. The comment above was talking about the Earth being center as a judgement call, which is a wildly different idea.
They orbit the earth in a different shape that is more complex than an ellipse.
For further reading, I like Early Wittgenstein, but warning, he is a meme for a reason, you will only understand 10%...
Imagine we have a table with black and white splotches. We could use a square fishnet with a fine enough resolution to accurately describe it. But why use a square fishnet? Why not use hexagons? They both can accurately describe it with a fine enough resolution.
All of science is built on this first step of choosing (squares or hexagons).
Maybe something easier than Wittgenstein, there is Waltz Theory of International Politics, specifically chapter 1. But that is more practical/applied than metaphysical. I find this a difficult topic to recommend a wikipedia article, as they are too specific to each type of knowledge and don't explain the general topic. Even the general topic gets a bit lost in the weeds. Maybe Karl Popper too.
> They orbit the earth in a different shape that is more complex than an ellipse.
But they don't. We know they don't. Not unless you use a weird definition of orbit that is very different from the one lotsofpulp was using. And if you do that you're not countering their argument, you're misconstruing it.
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".
The list of literary devices on Wikipedia is a tiny subset of the list of literary devices in reality. Although in this case it is a well-documented one: it's just a rhetorical question.
anyway it is just a writing style. if you don't like it, fine. If you can't parse it, well, now you can.
I didn't feel much at all. It's simply a rhetorical question which sets up the explicit claim being made in the title of the article. The structure is quite clear if you account for the entire text which I'm sure the author intended. Do you mean to assert that reasoning through the Socratic tradition is something to loathe and push against? In other words, you are leaning on a lot of ancillary personal concerns which I don't believe the author earned.
> 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.
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.
There's a great analog with this in chess as well.
~1200 - omg chess is so amazing and hard. this is great.
~1500 - i'm really starting to get it! i can beat most people i know easily. i love studying this complex game!
~1800 - this game really isn't that hard. i can beat most people at the club without trying. really I think the only thing separating me from Kasparov is just a lot of opening prep and study
~2300 - omg this game is so friggin hard. 2600s are on an entirely different plane, let alone a Kasparov or a Carlsen.
Magnus Carlsen - "Wow, I really have no understanding of chess." - Said without irony after playing some game and going over it with a computer on stream. A fairly frequent happening.
Funny how the start of your scale, 1200 Elo, is essentially what I have as a goal and am not even close yet, lol.
I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. Simplicity comes from strong definitions, and "infinite" complexity comes from weak ones.
If you're always chasing the next technicality then maybe you didn't really know what question you were looking to answer at the onset.
>If you're always chasing the next technicality
This sounds like someone who has never studied physics.
"Oh wow, I figured out everything about physics... except this one little weird thing here"
[A lifetime of chasing why that one little weird thing occurs]
"I know nothing about physics, I am but a mote in an endless void"
---
Strong or weak definitions don't save you here, what you are looking for is error bars and acceptable ranges.
Your response along with others is proving my point in an unfortunate way.
If you think I'm saying that the world is not infinitely complex, you are missing the point.
Simple counterexample: chess. The rules are simple enough we regularly teach them to young children. There's basically no randomness involved. And yet, the rules taken together form a game complex enough that no human alive can fully comprehend their consequences.
> Simplicity comes from strong definitions
Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable.
You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.
IMO both perspectives have their place. Sometimes what's missing is the information, sometimes what's lacking is the ability to communicate it and/or the willingness to understand it. So in different circumstances either viewpoint may be appropriate.
What's missing more often than not, across fields of study as well as levels of education, is the overall commitment to conceputal integrity. From this we observe people's habitual inability or unwillingness to be definite about what their words mean - and their consequent fear of abstraction.
If one is in the habit of using one's set of concepts in the manner of bludgeons, one will find many ways and many reasons to bludgeon another with them - such as if a person turned out to be using concepts as something more akin to clockwork.
Yes, we're in complete agreement about conceptual integrity.
Reality is such that, without integrity, you can prove almost anything you want. As long as your bar for "prove" is at the very bottom.
This is actually insightful: we usually don't know the question we are trying to answer. The idea that you can "just" find the right question is naive.
I think it's more of a curve from my point of view.
Beginner: I know nothing and this topic seems impossible to grasp.
Advanced beginner: I get it now. It's pretty simple.
Intermedite: Hmm, this thing is actually very complicated.
Expert: It's not that complicated. I can explain a simple core covering 80% of it. The other 20% is an ocean of complexity.
"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.
Most people believe that most things are knowable, and happily defer to published statistics whenever possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lizardman Constant:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
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.
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.
Most countries don't extend citizenship to illegals. No driver license, no housing, no benefits. They are irrelevant to the statistics- it would be like counting squirrels.
>They are irrelevant to the statistics
"Wow, why are the roads wearing out twice as fast as we expect?!"
Undocumented residents are pretty different from squirrels. They participate in the economy pretty similarly to documented residents. Consumption, transportation, jobs, housing, etc, and all the related taxation and resource utilization.
Would be tough to pull that off in Switzerland, having lived there for a stint. Can’t imagine the tax guys would be that happy.
> 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?
That seems to assume that immigration and emigration is not a significant factor for your country
> 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.
> it is better to use that than to go it alone.
frankly I don't think in any even half modern country you can go at it alone. I struggle to imagine how someone would physically manage to evade public authorities here in Germany where schooling is mandatory and any kid not in the education system would sooner or later be caught. There's barely even a place so remote authorities or other citizens would notice you and report you. You couldn't go to the doctor or anywhere really without identification or insurance.
So I think it's less of a function of trust and more simply of modernity, you're not going to escape attention for too long unless you're a trained spy or something
Here's a case from the US: https://radiolab.org/podcast/invisible-girl/transcript
"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?
> "Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?
In e.g. Germany that requires a signed statement from the landlord, and the ability to receive mail at that address. If you can't receive mail at your own address, it'd be noticed and reported within at most 5 years. I actually believe it'd be the national health insurance that'd be the first to notice & report you missing, as having health insurance is mandatory (even if you continue paying them, they'd notice it once they can't send you a replacement card).
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
> 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...
States aren't the ones doing the counting, though, the US Census Bureau is
Given that Texas forgot to take advantage of this during the last election, it would seem the incentives are pretty negligible.
> 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.
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.
The graph just after the paragraph you quoted contradicts it :)
It says the number of Venezuelans living abroad was 700,000 in 2015, and it skyrocketed from that point onward.
What happened around that time? - December 2014: Obama signed the first set of unilateral US sanctions on Venezuela - March 2015: Obama issued an executive order classifying Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States"
Sure, there may have been slow migration before the sanctions, but it could have been explained by a multitude of reasons, not necessarily Chavismo. For example, the frequent U.S.-backed riots and coups are surely a factor that encourages migration. People value security and stability.
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.
> 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.
> 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."
> There is no evidence that the UN estimate actually used better methods.
The article certainly argues that the UN used better methods. Do you have evidence to the contrary? See:
> So the 2022 population estimate was an extrapolation from the 2000 census, and the number that the PNG government arrived at was 9.4 million. But this, even the PNG government would admit, was a hazy guess... It’s not a country where you can send people to survey the countryside with much ease. And so the PNG government really had no idea how many people lived in the country.
> Late in 2022, word leaked of a report that the UN had commissioned. The report found that PNG’s population was not 9.4 million people, as the government maintained, but closer to 17 million people—roughly double the official number. Researchers had used satellite imagery and household surveys to find that the population in rural areas had been dramatically undercounted.
The article argues, but does not provide evidence. It specifically says the UN used surveys immediately after saying surveys don't work here. There's no validation that estimates from satellite imagery are better than the methods PNG used.
The fact the UN didn't adopt this report would certainly be an argument against it.
It's an article, not a 20 page research analysis. It provides detail aappropriate to its scope.
If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary. The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report. If you want to argue that the UN shelved it for reasons of accuracy rather than for political reasons, please provide the explanation for why the article is wrong and why you're right.
I mean, maybe you're right. I certainly don't know. But the article is going into a degree of depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.
> It's an article, not a 20 page research analysis. It provides detail aappropriate to its scope.
And if it merely cited the 20 page research analysis someone else did, that would be fine, but it doesn't.
The article also is rather disingenuous, leaving out a lot of context. Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid. Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.
> If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary, not just arguments.
While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate. While the CIA is hardly the ultimate source of truth, the arguments that PNG pressured the UN to change its estimates for its own internal political reasons can't possibly explain the CIA coming to the same conclusion.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/c...
> The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report.
The article spends a paragraph insinuating an ulterior motive while giving no evidence it is anything other than pure speculation.
> But the article is going into depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.
The article throws claims against the wall. It is obliged to defend them and it fails. That I can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search is convenient but irrelevant. Even if would take a year of extensive research to refute the claim, it does not change the fact the claim was never supported to begin with.
I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but I'm looking it up and you seem to be quite wrong:
> Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid.
It seems it was indeed an isolated UN estimate, done in conjunction with the University of Southampton, conducted because the country's census was cancelled, supposedly due to COVID. Yes the UN provides yearly estimates, but it looks like this was a separate, one-off research project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Papua_New_Guin...
You can see the sources Wikipedia links to.
> Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.
No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:
https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/49/loca...
As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.
> While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate.
The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques. They're mainly relying on official data provided by the countries themselves:
> Estimates and projections start with the same basic data from censuses, surveys, and registration systems, but final estimates and projections can differ as a result of factors such as data availability, assessment, and methods and protocols.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/
Again, I'm not an expert in any of this. But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find. It provides additional information, you're right that I don't know how the author got it. You say you "can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search." But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.
> Yes the UN provides yearly estimates, but it looks like this was a separate, one-off research project
Yeah, a one off research project that used different methods from every year before or since got totally different results. That was the point I was trying to make.
> No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:
That's what revised means. They updated it prior to publication in July 2023.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/fix-we-still-r...
> As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.
The report was leaked several months prior to publication. You'll note that every source claiming it was leaked was from early december 2022. You are engaging in exactly the same baseless speculation based on incomplete information that the article is.
> The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques.
They are trying to maximize accuracy using well accepted best practices. They adopt different numbers from either PNG's government or the UN. They are starting with the same data and doing their own analysis to reach an independent conclusion. If they knew the official data was highly skewed , they would account for it. Likewise there have been many other independent estimates, and an entire new census in 2024, all of which are nowhere near the 17 million estimate. Not utilizing a new technique that yields a radically different result from many different independent estimates and which is viewed with skepticism by experts is to be expected.
https://islandsbusiness.com/news-break/png-head-count-begins...
It's still possible that the one UN study was right and everyone else was wrong, but that claim can't be taken as a given, and it's certainly not supported in any way by the article.
> But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find.
How is every other independent estimate disagreeing with the 17 million figure not a clear contradiction of the article's implicit claim that the 17 million estimate is more accurate?
But even if you don't feel I've contradicted the article, again, I don't need to contradict the article. The article is the one making the claim, it has to prove it true.
> But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.
Everything I've said is backed up by sources. I'm not an expert, the sources could be wrong, but I'm going to go with all of them over a random article which makes incredible claims with no evidence.
The author brought up more examples besides PNG:
* Afghanistan
* Nigeria
* Congo
* South Sudan
* Eritrea
* Chad
* Somalia
* South Africa
Enough that "a lot" seems to be a fair characterization.
Also - while he implies this, I think it's important to mention explicitly - there's obvious fakery in the number of significant digits. If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million".
The only one of those that is an example is Nigeria. All the others are just listed as examples of countries that have not conducted a census in an extremely long time. While that's a good reason to think the numbers are probably inaccurate, it's not a good reason to think they are fake.
> there's obvious fakery in the number of significant digits. If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million"
The numbers aren't approximations to the nearest ten million. Just because they're inaccurate doesn't mean they're imprecise. For comparison if my bank statement is missing a large transaction it may be off the true value by hundreds of dollars, but that doesn't mean they didn't count the cents for the transactions they're aware of.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Can you provide an example that shows a radically different population count?
>If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda
Always?
How would you perform a census without massive amounts of money and cooperation from the government?
China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics, either through disppeared girls, hidden covid deaths, local economic fraud. There is also no independently verifiable group in China and is actually explicitly banned to use non-government methods.
> China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics
“entire countries” of population spans a range from single-digit hundreds to over a billion, so this could describe anything from an imperceptible error to an enormous one in China’s case.
I wonder if the population numbers could be reverse engineered through things like light pollution seen by satellites, or food consumption.
Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.
Yes, it absolutely can.
I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.
A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.
Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.
The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.
> Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.
Some people claim that the Earth is flat. I’m rather more inclined to believe China’s official statistics than what ‘some people’ on the internet have to say.
Yes, see the work of Fuxian Yi as one example: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi...
Why is the default assumption "just trust them bro, why would they lie!"?
That's not scientific. There's no verification or validation of data.
Your default assumption should be to question authority, especially if authority claims sole dominion over claims of fact, like "this is our population, because we say so."
They are humans with power, therefore they lie. If you don't have accountability feedback, you can never, ever check those lies, so you rely on proxies and legitimate models.
I highly recommend researching proxies you understand and can trust, and developing an understanding of the models that exist, and how to estimate confidence over a bounded range of values.
I don't think China has only 500 million people - that's a little silly. But I also don't think they have 1.4 billion, either, especially since one of their main justifications for that is "hey, we have this many phone accounts!" - their population control policies, their population decline, their cultural preference for male children and infant femicide, and so on don't jive with simple models of population growth based on human population growth constraints. If there's a deviation between properly error bounded models of populations over time in the hundreds of millions over the highest reasonably bounded value, something is suspicious.
You can take your reasonably bounded model and correlate with proxies - if the verifiable evidence supports the model over the claims, you can be more confident in the model than the claims.
Reliable proxies that can't be faked are difficult, and better models are going to be needed in the future as we get into AI slopageddon territory, where you can trivially fabricate entire identities and histories for billions of nonexistent people, even establishing social webs and histories for all of them, statistically indistinguishable from real people.
To perform a census, you need models constructed from verifiable data and first principles reasoning, with Bayesian certainty attached to each and every contributing factor, and then you need to set probabilistic bounds based on known levels of variability in things like population growth rates. Once you have an upper and lower bound, you can assign a certainty measure to the official claims - something like "this has a .01% chance of being true" - that's a good indication that reality diverges from those claims. It's not proof, it doesn't give you 100% certainty that some other number is precisely the case, but it's evidence.
The US government varies wildly in population counts, too, depending on which party is in power, which locales are being counted, the intent of the count, such as census, or estimation of population of illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants, etc. This is why census laws in the US forbid estimations or models or extrapolations; you need firsthand, auditable data collection, or fuckery occurs. The 2020 census was corrupted and then this was discovered by media and third party verification, for example. If you don't have a free press, things like that don't ever get revealed and confirmed, and authority is never held to account (in theory. In principle. In practice, power is rarely held to account anyway.)
In the United States, the media is nearly 100% controlled by political / business factions and while there is technically "free press" on the law, the money side of things prevents truth to be spread, unless you're on other media platforms that are not under control.
All "societies" from the smallest to the largest are built upon lies upon lies upon lies. When it starts falling apart, the violence commences.
How is a strong incentive alone evidence of wrongdoing?
I didn't say it was. I was just providing the context. The entire middle of the article describes the wrongdoing.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
I vouched for this comment, which got flagged dead. It’s got an accusatory tone, which is not great. But it also has accurate substance.
It’s true that westerners visiting nations like PNG for work are often cloistered behind elaborate security. This is in part because the organization has legal responsibility for sending those workers, and the deterrent security measures are way less expensive than the legal and PR headache of an incident. In addition, well-funded and highly organized foreign businesses attract local ire in ways that random individuals do not.
In any one of those countries at any given time there are also foreigners passing through on travel or less organized work (e.g. academia) who experience the country without that thick security layer… and are perfectly fine.
May be because they have less money. Almost any westerner is much richer than the locals, so makes a good target in a way that most South Americans do not.
This is true of a lot of foreign countries where people somewhat exaggerate the security issues, but really isn't of PNG. It's the kind of place where it's not just the foreigners who need a thick security layer to travel, there are plenty of places in the country where no official government representatives could safely travel to without basically bringing the army.
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.
Would they normally do witchcraft if they did not have those rules?
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.
Wait, is it witchcraft to use a machine created by witchcraft?
Forever?
at the very least, it's acceptance and support of witchcraft which has at times been plenty to justify execution
TikTok, sadly, is the best hypnotic spell ever made.
The US fucked it a couple of days ago, maybe it isn't any more.
I suspect they'll just replace the old recommendations with new ones.
They did, but they fucked it so hard it might actually lose users. They made it so dang obvious. They show you an error message if you send the word Epstein to someone in a private message. Even China's apps know they need to silently delete the censored message to avoid alerting the user.
I heard people are switching to an Australian clone app called Upscrolled? The same way people switched to rednote for a while until tiktok was unbanned the first time.
Curious what the rules were.
probably mostly "stay well away from people and stay away from these areas"
“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.
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.
at that point you are pretty much "throwing in the towel"
"throwing in the towel" would be a "I would do my job but I am forced to cheat the numbers otherwise I lose my job".
I was thinking more to a "I am grateful to my father's cousin for giving me a comfy job where I don't have to do much of the day, of course I am going to return a favor" kind of situation. Of course it is not always this way, but it is fairly frequent.
This is in particular true for those countries whose borders where designed not around ethnic lines but arbitrarily by external forces. The loyalty is to the clan, not to the state.
“If I had to work under a terrible system like that, I would simply continue to work under the system.”
Less than 0,000000000000000000000000001% of the people in the world cares about truth or about doing an honest job. The entire concept of doing anything which doesn't directly benefit them is laughable and alien to those.
That would be significantly less than one person, regardless of how off the population estimates are ;-)
This may say more about the people that surround you specifically. I have made the opposite experience.
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?
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.
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.
"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)
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.
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.
Just checked, Bangladesh has almost no unused land. Please take a look at google maps
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.
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
Again, those are just assumptions you make without further understanding of a great number of things.
If you looked at US infrastructure and based the population we should have on how a developing nations population works, then you'd come up with a number like 750 million to a billion people... because 6 to 10 people live in a house, right? FYI, average US household is 2.5 people.
Simply put you cannot make any of your assumptions without more knowledge.
> You can't do any assumptions because you just can't, okay??
Correct, show your homework, as the teacher says.
Or I should say, it's hypocritical in an article about population numbers being fake to generate your own fake set of numbers and say it's better.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It actually does - migration from central asian ex-USSR republics was and is massive.
And they've recently chewed through > 1 million young men: https://www.dw.com/en/12-million-russian-soldiers-killed-inj...
Have you read the article? It's casualties, which includes wounded. Article mentions that about 100-140k are killed, not >1m
It seems like, in the course of calling out a perceived assumption, you may have made an assumption yourself. I'm aware of the difference between casualties and deaths. My chosen terminology applies equally to both. And I think both are relevant to a number of related stats like lifetime earnings, mental and physical health, family prospects, etc.
War is hell. And I don't think anyone comes out untouched by it. The stats on vets are brutal.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Does it? Russia has 1/10th the purported population of China, lost most of their military aged men in a conflict that has exposed Russia's supposed military might as a work of fiction and yet the west remains scared senseless of Russia because of the nuclear threat. China has nuclear weapons, whether they have 10 million or 100 million men they can send to the frontlines to absorb bullets is irrelevant to their national security.
Mostly in the past before they were well industrialized. When you had India with over a billion people as a threat, it was a good measure. Now most of the surrounding countries have fallen below population replacement rate excess population can cause issues with economic growth in places resources and space are constrained.
> The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
The (excellent!) economist Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde is conducting excellent work on this, uncovering a lot of inconsistencies in population counts.
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.
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.
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
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...?
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.
The main tweet the article is referring to
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
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....
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) > divThat will probably break other archive.ph pages in the future, but you could accomplish the same thing by deleting the element in browser devtools.
Or you could be a non-techie like me and use no ad blocker etc....
Do you enjoy ads? If not, install an adblocker. There is no technical skill involved.
Chrome says no.
Of course that's why I use firefox now.
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly well, FWIW. The features that only "full" (MV2/Firefox) uBlock Origin supports are fairly advanced.
Agreed. Still blocks all the ads, but is much more efficient. Zero complaints here.
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.
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.
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.
Such an interesting article. Thanks for sharing it. Nothing interesting to say apart from this. I'll sleep less stupid tonight.
A lot of projection numbers on populations are inflated too.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Can't we just do a count(*) on the number of unique mobile numbers in every country? And add some estimate for children etc.
LOL. Did you read the article? Dude, many of these people don't have electricity.
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.
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...
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.
This particular topic is covered in the "Are there billions of fake people?" section of the linked article.
"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.
I downvoted you for preemptive self-proclaimed martyrdom, which is a grating way to post.
> 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.
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.
> I did not know that. I know of no other "people like me."
You peddle standard anti-china propaganda and you know no one like you? Strange.
> I have been following reports of China's population being overcounted for at least 25 years.
25 years? Amazing. Are you a professional anti-china propagandist or something?
And in your 25 years, you haven't heard anything about china undercounting their population? Even stranger.
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.
There we go. One strange nutjob says china is overcounting. Another strange nutjob says they are undercounting.
Then the fallacy of the middle ground says we must take Chinas number at face value.
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'.
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".
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.
> 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.
"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.
[dead]
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
Do you really think the outcome of western militaries vs nigeria will be different if Nigeria has a million or a billion people?
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?
Do you think that the British had an accurate census of the populations of all the places they were conquering on their attempt at world conquest in the 1600s-1800s?
Do you think they have an accurate census now? Isn’t this the very subject the author is trying to outline?
No, but you are the one presupposing that an accurate census is a necessary tool of colonialism and conquest, which seems not to be borne out in any way by the history of colonialism and conquest.
Modern data driven enterprises typically like to avoid failure and do so at an appropriate cost. They didn't have these tools at all in the past, and on occasion a misguided conquest could lead to the end of the conquesting nation.
The British state did not do most of the conquering, companies did and the government moved in later. India was originally taken by the East India Company.
Nope, and it didn't matter.
You need to know military, not population size (how quickly can a militia be raised, how long can it be sustained, how well they are armed, who can be persuaded to defect, etc.). This is related to population size, but not linearly.
Population counts get only interesting for military and tax potential during administration of a territory.
GP's point is valid, though, imho.
In your honest opinion, is current colonialism in /that/ country that is doing genocide more or less effective than South African apartheid?
>The population numbers of other countries are only relevant when serving an imperial or colonial enterprise.
Is this statement not in direct contention with this statement:
>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.
Surely the leader of the colonisation target country would like to know the population of the coloniser, so that they can get an understanding of how many soldiers to keep in the defence force?
Satellite photos?
You can easily get an estimate of the number of buildings and especially vehicles, which tell you two important things. Not to mention that as a matter of course the first thing to do is photograph everything that looks like a piece of military equipment, which has been a purpose of satellite photography from the beginning.
Various kinds of countries get paranoid about letting people have maps or accurate geographic data. This makes very little difference militarily but causes real inconvenience for the locals.
Besides, nobody wages wars for labour exploitation any more. It's all about what's under the ground.
Yeah, spy sat tech today is likely good enough to track every single person that steps outside in the FoV of the sat in real time.
If I am to start violent colonial project today I will care for resources not people. And depopulating an area is fixed cost.
Anyway with underdeveloped countries - you only need to bribe couple of people and you effectively run the country. Which once again is fixed cost.