Comment by hybrid_study
20 hours ago
The post leans too hard on “we have no idea.” Population numbers are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak census infrastructure, but that’s not the same as ignorance. Most countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them “fake” is misleading — it’s uneven data quality, not numerology. “Large uncertainty” ≠ “no idea.”
> 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.
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Agree. I feel that it is beneficial to present yourself larger than you really are.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
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.
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."
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7
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.
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.
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?
This comment is LLM generated.
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...
This isn't the first time I had encountered this specific type of ... char arrays. I think the major part of the author's intent is to just vent.
Worldwide, there are over 5 billion smartphones.[1] Yes, some people have more than one. They have to connect to the network, so there's a constant census of cellphones.
[1] https://electroiq.com/stats/smartphones-statistics/
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.