Comment by jjk166
18 hours ago
Fake is generally the wrong word. Inaccurate would be much more appropriate. Every population estimate is just that. There is going to be error. The error may be small or large, and it may be biased in one direction or another, but there is a clear chain from data to result. Even if your data sources are fraudulent, if you're making any attempt to account for that, though you may not do a very good job, it's still just inaccuracy. Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number. This may actually happen in a few cases, but the claim that it's widespread is both hard to believe and unsupported by this article.
> 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.
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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".
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> 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?
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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.