Comment by nostrebored
11 days ago
Countries have incentives to manipulate population data. Most error that I’m aware of is not attributable to poor data quality. For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have a strong incentive to show population growth.
>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
That study has...issues.
https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/ruralPopDis...