This is a good one. You know, it’s weird. I have personal experience with more than one of the countries in question, and it was sort of widely accepted that nobody actually knew how many people...
This is a good one.
You know, it’s weird. I have personal experience with more than one of the countries in question, and it was sort of widely accepted that nobody actually knew how many people lived in X city. But for whatever reason, when it came to GDP, I never thought to question it. (The same author argued very convincingly in a follow-up post that a lot of GDP figures are completely fake, too.) I don’t know how it somehow got fixed in my mind that GDP in these countries was legitimate — the veneer of respectability, I guess? Maybe it’s that I didn’t realize how much of The Number comes from the countries in question.
The PNG government conducts a census about every ten years. When the PNG government provided its 2022 estimate, the previous census had been done in 2011. But that census was a disaster, and the PNG government didn’t consider its own findings credible. So the PNG government took the 2000 census, which found that the country had 5.5 million people, and worked off of that one. 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.
[...]
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.
[...]
Like PNG, Nigeria is supposed to conduct a census every 10 years. But in Nigeria, the census is a politically fraught thing. Nigeria is not a natural polity, and its ongoing unity as a single country is fragile. And so Nigerian elites expend enormous effort to ensure that Nigeria remains one country. They have two important tools at their disposal. The first is the relative representation of different regions in the Nigerian state. And the second is the distribution of Nigeria’s vast oil revenues. Both of these—how many seats a state is given in the Nigerian parliament, and how large a share of oil revenues it receives—are determined by its share of the population.
So local elites have a strong incentive to exaggerate the number of people in their region, in order to secure more oil revenue, while national elites have a strong incentive to balance populations across states in order to maintain the precarious balance of power between different regions. And so the overwhelming bias in Nigerian population counts is toward extremely blatant fraud.
[...]
So the Nigerian government’s figure of 240 million people is, as is the case in Papua New Guinea, an extrapolation from a long-ago census figure. Is it credible? Very few people think so. Even the head of Nigeria’s population commission doesn’t believe that the 2006 census was trustworthy, and indeed said that “no census has been credible in Nigeria since 1816.” (Nigeria’s president fired him shortly thereafter.) There are plenty of reasons to think that Nigeria’s population might be overstated. It would explain, for instance, why in so many ways there appear to be tens of millions of missing Nigerians: why so few Nigerians have registered for national identification numbers, or why Nigerian voter turnout is so much lower than voter turnout in nearby African nations (typically in the 20s or low 30s, compared to the 50s or 60s for Ghana, Cameroon, or Burkina Faso), or why SIM card registration is so low, or why Nigerian fertility rates have apparently been dropping so much faster than demographers expected.
[...]
Nigeria is not the only poor country with an extremely patchy history of censuses. Indeed we find that countless poor nations with weak states have only the vaguest idea how many people they govern. 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.
[...]
And when we do have ground-truth data, we tend to find that satellite-based data doesn’t perform much better. Last year, three Finnish scientists published a study in Nature looking at satellite-based population estimates for rural areas that were cleared for the construction of dams. This was a useful test for the satellite data, because in resettling the people of those areas local officials were required to count the local population in a careful way (since resettlement counts determine compensation payments), and those counts could be compared to the satellite estimates. And again and again, the Finnish scientists found that the satellite data badly undercounted the number of people who lived in these areas. The European Commission’s GSH-POP satellite tool undercounted populations by 84 percent; WorldPop, the best performer, still underestimated rural populations by 53 percent. The pattern held worldwide, with particularly large discrepancies in China, Brazil, Australia, Poland, and Colombia. Nor is it just rural areas being resettled: WorldPop and Meta estimated slums in Nigeria and Kenya to be a third of their actual size.
This is a good one.
You know, it’s weird. I have personal experience with more than one of the countries in question, and it was sort of widely accepted that nobody actually knew how many people lived in X city. But for whatever reason, when it came to GDP, I never thought to question it. (The same author argued very convincingly in a follow-up post that a lot of GDP figures are completely fake, too.) I don’t know how it somehow got fixed in my mind that GDP in these countries was legitimate — the veneer of respectability, I guess? Maybe it’s that I didn’t realize how much of The Number comes from the countries in question.
Anyway, good post.
From the article:
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]
[...]