- 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.
by hybrid_study
10 subcomments
- 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.”
- 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.
by merryocha
4 subcomments
- 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.
by stevenjgarner
1 subcomments
- Even in the USA, the census is not as accurate as it thinks (without even getting into the homeless situation). South Dakota is the capital of the "Nomad" phenomenon because of its favorable residency and tax laws for full-time travelers (RVers and truckers) - such that residency is legal from a PO Box.
The US Census is "de jure" (based on where you live and sleep most of the time), not where your mail goes, so the SD nomad population can go uncounted. The Census Bureau generally does not mail forms to PO Boxes. They use a Master Address File (MAF) based on physical residential structures. If you are an RV'er and you were at a campsite in Arizona on Census Day (April 1st), you were technically supposed to be counted there, not in South Dakota. Many truckers are "transient" and difficult for the Bureau's "Non-Response Follow-Up" (the people who knock on doors) to catch.
Many are not counted. This creates a fascinating paradox: South Dakota has a high number of legal residents (on paper/licenses) but a lower enumerated population (on the Census). South Dakota might have enough "licensed residents" to clog their DMV and insurance systems, but because those people weren't "counted" in the physical state during the Census, the state doesn't get the federal highway or healthcare dollars to support the infrastructure they use when they do pass through.
It’s a bizarre irony: In PNG, the government "invents" people (overcounting) to get more aid; in South Dakota, the system "loses" people (undercounting) because the administrative tools (physical addresses) don't match the modern lifestyle.
- >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.
by direwolf20
5 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- “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.
- 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....
by postsantum
5 subcomments
- 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?
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by stevenjgarner
0 subcomment
- > Here’s my favorite fact: Papua New Guinea, with about 0.1 percent of the world’s population, hosts more than 10 percent of the world’s languages. Two villages, separated perhaps only by a few miles, will speak languages that are not mutually intelligible.
In the author's example of PNG, dare I ask "why does it matter what the population is"? If the bulk of the people are living their own lives beyond "civilization", speaking unknown languages, without the government providing any kind of infrastructure or services, then why is it important how many people there are?
- 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.
- There are two competing incentives for census data.
1) Government wants to know its own population so it knows how much tax revenue to expect.
2) Government wants to appear larger to appear stronger to both enemies and friends.
by sixsevenrot
0 subcomment
- In March 1937, the four main statistical professionals working on the Census in TsUNKhU – the chief of the Sector for Population, Mikhail Kurman; chief of the Census Bureau, Olimpiy Kvitkin; his deputy, Lazar Brand; and the chief of the Sector for transportation and communication, Ivan Oblomov, were arrested and imprisoned. Soon they were joined by the Chief of TsUNKhU, Ivan Kraval, and the chiefs of most of the regional statistical centers, and executions followed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Soviet_census
by thunderbong
1 subcomments
- The main tweet the article is referring to
https://x.com/BonesawMD/status/2010343792126128535
by Anonyneko
1 subcomments
- 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...?
by rossdavidh
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by blaufuchs
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- Yet a lot of the global dashboards we argue over are built on numbers that might be wrong by tens of millions, and we rarely stop to ask how those numbers were actually produced
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by TristanBall
0 subcomment
- I suspect Digicel's marketing dept could give you the realtime PNG population to 6 decimal places.
Joking obviously, but only just.
- The (excellent!) economist Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde is conducting excellent work on this, uncovering a lot of inconsistencies in population counts.
- Such an interesting article. Thanks for sharing it. Nothing interesting to say apart from this. I'll sleep less stupid tonight.
- 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.
by vgivanovic
2 subcomments
- >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.
by genericacct
0 subcomment
- Some "developed" countries are not much better in that regard
- But we know how many cell phones, vehicles are in the world…
by yanhangyhy
0 subcomment
- i was going to say there are so many VIDEOS or disccuion around china's, saying china only have 6-7 B not 10 B not 14 B people...ok the comments already started this..
by orbisvicis
0 subcomment
- Why does meta care how many kids a country has?
- A lot of projection numbers on populations are inflated too.
by itsamario
1 subcomments
- 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.
by modo_mario
0 subcomment
- Wasn't the UK recently shown to be wildly off wrt it's numbers of people leaving the country?
From 77,000 to 257,000 at some point
by CGMthrowaway
5 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by lurker919
2 subcomments
- Can't we just do a count(*) on the number of unique mobile numbers in every country? And add some estimate for children etc.
- I've seen the narrative that population estimates are wildly wrong on the high side become more popular in the last few years. It's hard not to think it's yet more enabling work for creeping fascism.
To be clear, the linked article is actually quite balanced apart from the click bait headline, I'm talking about the sort of thing it references from Twitter.
- 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".
by readthenotes1
1 subcomments
- "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.
by Supermancho
0 subcomment
- > 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.
by theyneverlear
0 subcomment
- [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.
- 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!!
by AreShoesFeet000
2 subcomments
- 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.
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