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.

Quoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple."

That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.

If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.

The post leans too hard on “we have no idea.” Population numbers are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak census infrastructure, but that’s not the same as ignorance. Most countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them “fake” is misleading — it’s uneven data quality, not numerology. “Large uncertainty” ≠ “no idea.”

Link is dead but I think the population number of DRC (Congo) can't be right

Look at the size of the country (around 1/3 of USA) and the number of people living there (112M according to wikipedia), also 1/3 of USA. So the density should be about the same but when you look at satellite photos it's one giant city (18M), several smaller cities and the endless forest. Can it support other 90M people?

I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.

“The next census, in 1991, was by far the most credible, and it shocked many people by finding that the population was about 30 percent smaller than estimated. But even that one was riddled with fraud. Many states reported that every single household had exactly nine people.”

If I worked in the government of a country like this I’d just throw in the towel.

Poor methodology or even some bug in an Excel macro at the UN headquarters could well be a reason behind the sudden, synchronous decline of population in all cultures and political systems of this planet.

And like the article suggests it can be deliberate too. Am extremely skeptical of population figures in some parts of former Soviet Union. The official demographic loss figures in WW2 had tripled since 1945 but post-war census figures were never revised. That could easily account for the "demographic collapse" of 1990s.

>Every election would have to be fake. Every government database would have to be full of fake names. And all for what? To get one over on the dumb Westerners?

While I agree that the claim that world population is under 1 billion is bonkers, I also think he grossly underestimates how frequent and large the fraud is.

Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people. This is not recognized by the venezuelan government and is not reflected in any of the stats pages you can find.

That's a 20-30% difference in the real vs reported population of the country.

And yes. They do fake the elections.

A previous employer deployed a wireless relay network through the jungle in PNG and had rules to obey to avoid being accused of witchcraft and burned.

Data quality is always going to be an issue. In this case the reporting is based on an honor system. I imagine extrapolation using satellite imagery and mathematics on people mobility would be good for validation and correlation.

I had a coworker who had lived in Nigeria, working for the oil companies, with some pretty crazy stories. Duffle bags full of money guarded by squads of guys with machine guns being a normal day to day practice in some parts of the business. Extreme poverty right next to country clubs for the oil company staff. It wouldn't surprise me that they are up or town tens of millions of people.

Lebanon has had no official census since ... 1932. Since the constitution distribute the power based on religion, any census that would mention religion might put into question the current distribution. In a country already plagued with religious conflict, this is less than ideal. You could make a secular census, but that might also reveal the extent of the population who is leaving Lebanon. So the Lebanese governments and political elites have done what they do best : Absolutely nothing (while stealing as much money as possible).

It is both funny and sad that we have more accurate number of the size of the Lebanese diaspora than the actual number of people living in Lebanon.

I don't trust China's population numbers at all. Officially before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth when birth control is brutally enforced?

The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.

If anything their total population went down during one child policy.

The main tweet the article is referring to

https://x.com/BonesawMD/status/2010343792126128535

I remember hearing that NYC had millions of commuters a day via NJTransit.

I took those trains for a decade and the math doesnt add up. The capacity of the carts and speed they operate through the tunnel suggests less than a million at most.

It's somewhat common knowledge that China's population count has been inflated for some time now, perhaps by 100's of millions. Not hard to believe when you realize how much data out of China is very difficult to verify (like GDP for instance). Evidence typically cited to support this are discrepancies in birth data, reports of 350 million duplicate IDs and fertility rates likely lower than official estimates. It's also reasonable to conclude there are systemic incentives for local officials to exaggerate numbers.

There is a strange pro-China faction on HN that will downvote me for this comment (not that this comment is at all anti-China) However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.

Cannot get to the page, from the wayback machine, the link works odd for me, but select "A lot of population numbers are fake" once the page displays.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260129141207/https://davidoks....

Feels like this should dive into accuracy and precision? And for the next fun number to look into, try declared calories on food packaging.

Just don't fall into the trap of thinking you can't use these values if they are not perfectly accurate.

> Actually faking the existence of billions of people would require a global conspiracy orders of magnitude more complex than anything in human history...

This is wildly incorrect and is intentionally narrow minded - obvious by the end of the paragraph. All there has to be is financial incentive. There were multiple, for decades. Aligned incentives are far more effective than coordinated deception. Ofc this assertion comes right after acknowledging that an island nation literally miscounted by HALF. I'm not sure there's anything in this blog post worth remembering. It seems ill-considered.

This sounds very conspiracy-y. I'm sure there are metrics like consumption of certain items like food, medicine, etc. which is at a mostly consistent level accross subsections the human population. Like arthiris medication, foodstuffs, diapers etc.

It would take a very involved conspiracy to make these numbers fall in line with where they should be given a certain pop cap, and I'm not sure what would be the benefit.

Like all conspiracy theories, if it requires a coordination of large unrelated organizations over long timeframes, which seems impossible even over the table, its almost certainly fake.

Like you can fake census data, but not how many cans of beans does a US-headquartered supermarket chain sells.

The population numbers of other countries are only relevant when serving an imperial or colonial enterprise. In a way this article reads somewhat like a mob boss complaining that their accountant is skimming off the top.

If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make sure those numbers would never be accessible for westerners as it’s the fist thing you need to know when you decide to wage war of any kind against some people.