Is there a group that audits these numbers?
What would stop a country like China or India from tacking on a few hundred million people to their population counts?
As to why they would do something like that, who knows? I’m just wondering if there is actually a way of verifying the numbers.
Count ears and divide by two.
Yes there are ways to verify the results. For example, satellite photos will show how much light pollution is coming from a given area, and (all things being equal) that correlates with population. In fact, the CIA publishes a World Fact Book which contains information like population of each country. But you also need to ask what is there to be gained from lying? If you discover a motive for lying, it might also be possible to compensate by adjusting for the lie itself.
Actually, population figures can be quite controversial. For very large countries, they are not based on actual counts but on assumptions and extrapolations. Even in the US the figures are based on models and assumptions to account for people missed by censuses as well as illegal immigrants. There was arecent controversy alleging that, due to overcounting by China, India’s population has now overtaken it and India is the most populous country in the world.
Let’s take a simple example. Suppose you see some people getting off a bus and you realize too late that you wanted to count them. You wish you had counted them one by one as they got off the bus but it’s too late now. What can you do? First, you could stop people on the street and ask them, “Did you just get off the bus?”, then count how many said yes. That’s a raw number, but it’s obviously not the correct answer. You need to allow for the fact that a few people probably walked away before you got a chance to ask them and some of them might have lied. But you can estimate, based on the size of the crowd and how fast it is moving, how many people would walk away quickly. You could even run an experiment to verify your estimate. Wait for the next bus, count everyone as they step off, and then go through the crowd asking people, “Did you just get off the bus?”. Suppose 14 people said yes from the first bus, 21 said yes from the second bus, and you actually counted 30 people get off. You could conclude from this that roughly 30% of the actual passengers either walked away before you had a chance to ask them or they lied. Now you could logically conclude that the most likely answer from the first bus is 20 passengers. And then you could look at the capacity of the bus itself and try to estimate how full it was before the passengers disembarked. If the results are close, you can have more confidence in the answer.
But obviously we don’t get perfect answers. We’re bound to have some places where the population estimate is lower than the truth and some places where it’s higher. Hopefully, these errors would tend to cancel each other out. If the total is off by a hundred million (which I don’t think it is), that would just mean we’re at 7.5 billion or 7.7 billion instead of 7.6, which doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
A concern in many developing countries is that the total for a census will be inflated because individual regions will try to inflate the numbers from their region, to attract more resources from the central government.
My friend’s friend’s cousin’s nanny’s friend’s cousin’s friend says she counted them.
You realize that you would miss those with congenital ear agenesis, right?
…which would be partially offset by those with 3 or more ears. 
The average person has one testicle.
Less than one.
Also, less than two arms.
I’ve always considered world population figures to be an intelligent estimate, not the precise Gospel Truth. What’s important to me is that the world population is too high and it is getting higher daily.
Is this about overpopulation or opiate abuse?
Although many of the traditional methods used to perform census estimates are based upon unvalidated assumptions, Facebook is using social media tracking to produce what it believes are highly accurate mapping of people in developing nations, even those who aren’t Facebook or social media users itself.
Yes, this is basically the one half of the evil plot of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Fortunately, they aren’t developing a fleet of aircraft capable of “continuous suborbital flight” for constant monitori…Oh, shit!
Stranger
Wow, thanks. I’ll use this in the “Maps and Society” class I teach.
Will you include an image of the Winter Soldier peeking around from behind Mark Zuckerberg? Because that would be awesome.
Stranger
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
The good news is that the number of children born each year is been fairly flat for the last few decades, around 130-140 million babies per year and expected to decrease slightly in the coming decades. The only reason the population is still going up is that the upper age brackets have fewer people in them, hence fewer total deaths. Once the people who are middle-aged now become senior citizens, the world population will stabilize. At that point, we’ll have 130-140 million babies born each year and 130-140 million people dying each year and the world population will flatten out, maybe start to go down a little bit. That’s good news.
The bad news is that the plateau is likely to be around 11 billion and many experts say Earth’s long-term human capacity is below 2 billion. But the good news is that we could get back down to 2 billion in less than a century without increasing the number of deaths per year. All it would take is decreasing the number of births to about one baby per woman. During the 20th century, the average number of babies per woman dropped from 5 to 1.6, mostly by convincing women that having lots of babies was not necessary for the family to prosper. If we build on that success and get the rate down to 1.0 babies per woman, the world population can drop to 2 billion in less than 100 years.
Oops, I just realized that 1.6 is the current rate for Canada, not the whole world. The worldwide rate is now 2.4 and is expected to drop below 2.1 this century. I still say it’s plausible that we could get that number down to 1. All we have to do is convince everyone that it’s the right thing to do.
And more importantly, provide options for both birth control and universal basic health services so that people don’t feel compelled to have more children than they can support. This is moral problem for some people who hold onto archaic views about family planning.
Stranger