A lot of population numbers are fake

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.

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.

>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 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.

Yea, that would leave the US and Japan with about half the world population assuming our counts are even close to correct.

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.

Especially anything that's self reported or whatnot. People lie. People misunderstand questions. No process is perfect.

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.

Edit: changed world-wife (which sounds interesting demographically) to world-wide

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.

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.

Doesn't that describe many US states? (although sometimes desert/plains/etc instead of forest)

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.

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".

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum

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.

[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...

>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.

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'.

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.

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.

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.