10 ms·

Some economists have been relying on bogus population data

139 points by danso 3y ago

ggm 3y ago
Curve fitting. There has to be an XKCD for this! Some economies, like New Zealand/Aeoteoroa were not populated until 1200/1300 CE which would be interesting to see in the stats. Other economies populated as translocation/transmigration of the population of other places wholesale. Indonesia had this, at scale. Millions of people moving. Hong Kong. 1949 partition in India caused massive shifts between two economies. Do we discount this happening in past times? Estimates of population based on the number of individuals reported killed in battle would be very culturally informed. I have no idea how many camp followers a hoarde has, facing off the Roman army in Farther Gaul or Spain. How do you estimate population under migratory communities in steppes, or climate change effects in northern Europe? It feels very guesswork-y I liked the circularity reference. Easy to buttress yourself in a chain of references to peer review legitemacy, so economy estimates inform population and vice versa? use economic indicators when you don't have pop stats and don't ask too many questions where they came from!
- Uriopass 3y ago
  xkcd 2^11 https://xkcd.com/2048/ https://xkcd.com/2048/
- nelblu 3y ago
  1947* for partition of India.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Apologies.
- tacker2000 3y ago
  > Aeoteoroa If you must use the new name, at least make the effort to spell it correclty
  - ggm 3y ago
    Apologies, After a certain time you can't edit s/Aeotaoroa/Aotearoa/g Also s/correclty/correctly/g
bawolff 3y ago
I feel like it would be more shocking if we did.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
orlp 3y ago
We do not even know what 'countries' there were for the past 2000 years.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  There weren't many "countries", per se. There are artifacts from most major empires but untold numbers of city-states, villages, and small-medium settlements are lost to time. There are some finds like Los Millares in the Eneolithic, but there isn't much left of mesolithic settlements apart from about a dozen examples. In terms of proof of political organization, that requires evidence like writing or inscriptions.
  - sakex 3y ago
    One could argue that the mere presence of settlements is evidence of political organisation.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > One could argue that the mere presence of settlements is evidence of political organisation. This is ofuscatory, twice: 1. One could argue anything 2. presence of settlements is an indicator of political organisation, but political organisation is not a requirement for settlements
      - sakex 3y ago
        > 2. presence of settlements is an indicator of political organisation, but political organisation is not a requirement for settlements I disagree. People living next to each other need to reach a political order (organisation) even if it is tacit. A common understanding of a shared living space where you can trust your neighbour to not try to steal you or enslave you is a form of political organisation, even if no interaction between the settlers ever occur. Likewise, a settlement where the strongest people enslave the others is also a political organisation. Also, seasonal settlements where people only spend a few weeks a year also require political organisations to coordinate on the dates and logistics. Monarchy and anarchy are forms of political organisation, just like families, unions and corporations. I would agree if we were talking about _Institutionalised_ political organisation, but this statement would still be wrong: > In terms of proof of political organization, that requires evidence like writing or inscriptions. Other forms of evidence can prove institutionalised politics. For instance, the presence of shared infrastructure, palaces, temples, monuments, royal funerary sites, battles, etc.
voz_ 3y ago
The notion of a pre Westphalian nation is itself a little flawed, so definitionally it doesn’t even really make sense to pose the metric as such, let alone measure it.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Well, there existed both nations and nation-states, fighting other nation states (often with conscious national sentiment and pride, like any modern era nation). It was not all some blur, just because they didn't have modernity-style institutions.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    But particularly the post-1648 notion of compact integrated territory just isn't there in premodern times except in a few exceptional cases, and population counting in the modern sense is bound up in that. But to take a particularly egregious case in the Holy Roman Empire a person might have three legal "existences" from the state's standpoint: one as a mediate vassal, one as an imperial knight, and one as a delegate of the church, and by the thought process of the HRE that was three different "persons" in one body.
    - HDMI_Cable 3y ago
      I wonder if there's religious symbolism attached to this, i.e., I wonder if people in the HRE made an allusion between the trinity you mentioned and that of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
      - consilient 3y ago
        No, three is just an arbitrary number for their example. The point is not the exact number of roles but the fact that the basic legal unit is the relationship, not the person. For instance a prince-bishop might in principle be subject to an archbishop as a bishop, subject to the Emperor as an imperial prince, subject to the King of Bohemia (who was in turn subject to the Emperor) as the holder of a secular fief, and part of the Polish nobility, all at once.
larsrc 3y ago
Well, duh! We hardly know the population of any country more that a few hundred years ago. Even now, some numbers are guesswork - how many Russians have died in the war in Ukraine? That's already an uncertainty of tens of thousands. For older societies, who even counted as persons? Slaves? Babies? Prisoners of war? Outlaws living in the woods? And that's even assuming there _is_ a census. The Domesday Book was quite exceptional a thousand years ago, and even that only gives us a population estimate between 1.2 and 1.6 million (see Wikipedia). Any place with a poorer census or written record (i.e most of the world at the time) would be even more of a guesswork.
- qsort 3y ago
  > For older societies, who even counted as persons? Even more importantly, who is writing. Julius Caesar defeating seven bajillion Gauls is not a figure that should be taken at face value if the source of that number is Julius Caesar.
- watwut 3y ago
  > For older societies, who even counted as persons? Slaves? Babies? Prisoners of war? Outlaws living in the woods? Is there any reason whatsoever to NOT count slaves and babies as persons? You can not count them as citizens or adults, but surely they are persons.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    The question is what those older societies included in their censuses. The reason for the census and the definition of a person can vary wildly. Remember that not that long ago at this scale, the USA considered slaves as 3/5 of a person when determining states' populations for representation and taxation purposes.
  - bazoom42 3y ago
    Historically, census was typically done for taxation purposes. Kids, homeless etc was just not that relevant since households were taxed. Slaves counted as property, not persons.
  - 3y ago
moomin 3y ago
For those of us who only read the headline: this is debunking claims by economists and pointing out they’re building their theories on sand.
- cfn 3y ago
  And they (the economists) may not be the only ones.
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks. This is one of those cases where the article is more interesting than its title. I've taken a crack at revising the title, though not a very good crack - it's better to use language from the article itself and I didn't do that in this case. If anyone wants to comb through the article and find a representative phrase that would be more suitable, we'll happily edit it again.
  - ianai 3y ago
    I'd add "some" to the prefix it. Econ papers vary widely in quality. The lack of a quantifier could be taken to mean this is the new unrepresentative lab rats.
    - dang 3y ago
      Ok, I've put some up there. Thanks!
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Original title was far more accurate than the editorialised one which is extremely inaccurate ("economists" outside the subfield of economic history do not "typically" "rely" on population data for the pre-Industrial Revolution period at all) and seems like clickbait for people to add their middlebrow-at-best dismissals of the field. "Widely used historical population time series mostly guesswork" would be a more accurate title, though you might get a few "water is wet" replies :)
  - throwaway154 3y ago
_dain_ 3y ago
we don't even know it for modern countries either. i think it's plausible that the UK government undercounts the population by 5-10%. https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1682676824420253697 https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1682676824420253697
- blitzar 3y ago
  I can feel that twitter account draining my IQ just by looking at it. "One of Britain's forgotten issues is that the government does not know who is currently in the United Kingdom, in any sense." True if one ignoring the census, or the many registers, national and regional, the 1 surveillence camera for every 10 people watching over us or the many corporate holders of everything from your physical location to your browsing history that they are compelled to report to the UK government.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    That thread is not substantially incorrect; the data really isn't very well correlated. You can estimate using things like "number of mobile phone users" or "internet users", but that leaves out potentially large numbers of people. The census and the electoral register are basically voluntary (yes, the electoral roll is mandatory, but not meaningfully enforced at all). Agree that the account is sus, starting from the anime pfp.
    - blitzar 3y ago
      > the data really isn't very well correlated It is however trivial to correlate - if there was a desire (or significant error) deemed it to be so. Of course basing your population estimate off the number of tax returns would "leave out some people" (>90% of the population of the uk for that example). Likewise basing it off the register of all children in schools would ignore most people over the age of 18. Ultiately the issue is that these people claim is rife is - all these undocumented people are getting all the jobs, benefits, healthcare, housing, government grants and school places which ignores the fact that to get any of those you have to be documented and registered on a myriad of systems to access that.
vladms 3y ago
I was expecting though a more comprehensive result on the "bad use" of the data, the section "How Economists Use MJ", mentions ~14 papers (out of how many? out of how many checked? any quantitative analysis?) that will be affected (and anyhow in various ways). This seems to have some educational value to some (economics) authors that rely too much on the fact population is known, but there are many bad assumptions done in many papers, so doubt this (some researchers relying too much on inexact data) is such an outlier.
- notahacker 3y ago
  In fairness, Maddison's time series which use MJ are pretty much the canonical source for the "look how much things have changed" graphs, and data errors make "look, France was much richer than Poland" sort of comparisons" more dubious[1] But it's also not as relevant or surprising as it sounds, since the numerator of those fractions is also guesswork. They're not dividing accurate figures for the total wealth of European countries to get an inaccurate estimate of how rich the "average" person was, they're actually tending to work the opposite way from scant data on wages, prices and what "average" people owned multiplied by scant data on population to get a wealth of the nation figure[2]. Needless to say, there's a lot of margin for error subjectivity and scope for the introduction of personal biases in those estimates too (not to mention the inequalities and completely different access to stuff that makes adjusting for purchasing power and comparing the wealth of Inca subjects, the average medieval Englishman, the average modern Equatorial Guinean and the average modern Briton from a single GDP per capita PPP metric pretty dubious) Essentially no economic theory (as opposed to economic history) depends on the accuracy pre-Industrial Revolution time series for inspiration or validation, and if you double the values for the period before the exponential growth curve, you still get an exponential growth curve. [1]except to the extent that the figures were guesstimated based on the consensus of historians that country X is much richer than country Y [2] cf modern Nigeria, where we have reasonably accurate census data and an "oops, using our new method of calculating GDP, it seems to have doubled previous estimates"
1letterunixname 3y ago
Edit: Economists are the modern first estate: the statistical clerics preaching the benefits of greed. Now with alternative facts! Old title about 200 years claim: While the Middle East, Egypt, and Greece contain the longest continuously occupied cities, the nations and people who compromise them changed and lost generational memory over the centuries. And few continuous civilizations survive in any meaningful form for more than 250 years / 10 generations on average.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >the nations and people who compromise them changed and lost generational memory over the centuries Changed yes. "Lost generational memory" why? If you mean "lost direct memory of 2 or 3 millenia ago" sure.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I've started to think about this too. Economics isnt a science, its an orthodoxy of rules and beliefs. Sure there are some correlations that hit true, but outside a few true-isms, its basically a religion.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Economics is a science, but a social one. That means that, as much as they try to stuff it with math, economics remains fundamentally an application of loose sociologic principles, which are themselves extremely debatable. The genius is that that bit of casual math instantly insulate economists from their peers (i.e. historians, sociologists, etc), no matter how bogus such math might be.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      The problem is lots of economists at least seem to think that what makes something a science is "using math" rather than "validating or disproving theories via observation". I've even seen people sneer "mere heuristics" at suggestions to try that...
sakex 3y ago
Interesting application of Hyrum's Law
- DrScientist 3y ago
  Had to look that up. Reminds me of biology and evolution - biology isn't designed it just evolves based on observable properties of systems.
atdrummond 3y ago
ONS has been working hard in the UK to revise their method of assessing immigration numbers, after the previous system undercounted by at least 1.6m (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/24/eu-immigration-uk-underestimated-16-million/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/24/eu-immigrati...). Papua New Guinea’s population was significantly larger than thought - closer to 18 million than 9 million. (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507443/amp/Papua-new-guineas-population-doubles-overnight.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507443/amp/Papua-...) Suffice to say, this is a problem us Economic Historians and many other social scientists have been aware of for some time.
- pjc50 3y ago
  The UK, unlike continental Europe, doesn't have either domestic registration or even exit passport number tracking. The EU has a much better idea of how many people are legally in Schengen than the UK does about EU nationals.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  You're concerned about bogus data, and using the Daily Mail as the source of truth for verification?
  - atdrummond 3y ago
    The DM isn’t the source and there are dozens of articles that will report the same finding. I’m not going to spend the extra time to find an ideologically neutral “news” org for an HN post when the topic being discussed is generally agreed upon.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Can't place all blame on Economists or any social science. Data Gathering is hard. At some point all data is an estimate.
- selectodude 3y ago
  We don’t even know the current human population within more than a couple percent. Being at the right order of magnitude for things that happened centuries ago seems pretty good to me.
gdprrrr 3y ago
In other words: Economists don't know about error bars.
- drowsspa 3y ago
  As a physicist, it might just be my layman's impression, but it does seem like economics people are just putting a list of points in Excel, no error bars or anything. I don't think I've ever seen some error propagation stuff in some Economics calculation.
  - huitzitziltzin 3y ago
    As a physicist, I think you probably don’t have enough experience with economics research. (Which is fine! It’s not your field!) Quantification of uncertainty is bread and butter for us! Criticize the field fo relying on null hypothesis significance testing, not for failing to provide measures of uncertainty!!
    - drowsspa 3y ago
      I've seen errors being considered while fitting a model, but not in the source data or when using the fitted data in another calculation. But yeah, I hope it's just a simplification for laymen like me. But the fact that apparently there weren't errors bars in a dataset so important such as population estimatives doesn't give me the right impression
  - addcommitpush 3y ago
    They care enough to p-hack [0] though [0] https://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsciences.uottawa.ca.economics/files/1505e.pdf https://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsc...
huitzitziltzin 3y ago
To be less dramatic and more realistic than this headline: there is a small set of economics papers which make use of an inaccurate estimate of populations way in the distant past. Seriously the fraction of papers in which you see these data used is in my personal experience 0. As a fraction of the total amount of economics research produced annually is probably 10^-6 or smaller. It just isn’t necessary in 99.99999% of papers to make any reference to any national or regional populations 2,000 years ago or more. Also maybe ask the authors of these papers how seriously they take the estimates OR how much weight they ask the estimates to bear in their papers?? “Not very” and “not much” are the most likely answers.
- throw_pm23 3y ago
  Yes, and the rest of the economics papers have other issues.
- dkural 3y ago
  The headline itself is bogus, saying "typically", where the real number is a couple dozen out of hundreds of thousands.
mistrial9 3y ago
The opposite appears to be more the story - why did Gates-Meta-FB Research put millions of dollars into post-doc methods to quantify "every school on Earth" or "population density of every 10km area on Earth" ? Their detailed mapping world-wide is well known and documented.. the FB people had some .. excuse me.. cult-like phrases about "nobody is excluded" .. It seems like economic spying with a cover of social goals to motivate young coders, from here.

139 points by danso 3y ago

ggm 3y ago

Curve fitting. There has to be an XKCD for this! Some economies, like New Zealand/Aeoteoroa were not populated until 1200/1300 CE which would be interesting to see in the stats. Other economies populated as translocation/transmigration of the population of other places wholesale. Indonesia had this, at scale. Millions of people moving. Hong Kong. 1949 partition in India caused massive shifts between two economies. Do we discount this happening in past times? Estimates of population based on the number of individuals reported killed in battle would be very culturally informed. I have no idea how many camp followers a hoarde has, facing off the Roman army in Farther Gaul or Spain. How do you estimate population under migratory communities in steppes, or climate change effects in northern Europe? It feels very guesswork-y I liked the circularity reference. Easy to buttress yourself in a chain of references to peer review legitemacy, so economy estimates inform population and vice versa? use economic indicators when you don't have pop stats and don't ask too many questions where they came from!

Uriopass 3y ago
xkcd 2^11 https://xkcd.com/2048/ https://xkcd.com/2048/
nelblu 3y ago
1947* for partition of India.
- ggm 3y ago
  Apologies.
tacker2000 3y ago
> Aeoteoroa If you must use the new name, at least make the effort to spell it correclty
- ggm 3y ago
  Apologies, After a certain time you can't edit s/Aeotaoroa/Aotearoa/g Also s/correclty/correctly/g

bawolff 3y ago

I feel like it would be more shocking if we did.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

orlp 3y ago

We do not even know what 'countries' there were for the past 2000 years.

1letterunixname 3y ago
There weren't many "countries", per se. There are artifacts from most major empires but untold numbers of city-states, villages, and small-medium settlements are lost to time. There are some finds like Los Millares in the Eneolithic, but there isn't much left of mesolithic settlements apart from about a dozen examples. In terms of proof of political organization, that requires evidence like writing or inscriptions.
- sakex 3y ago
  One could argue that the mere presence of settlements is evidence of political organisation.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > One could argue that the mere presence of settlements is evidence of political organisation. This is ofuscatory, twice: 1. One could argue anything 2. presence of settlements is an indicator of political organisation, but political organisation is not a requirement for settlements
    - sakex 3y ago
      > 2. presence of settlements is an indicator of political organisation, but political organisation is not a requirement for settlements I disagree. People living next to each other need to reach a political order (organisation) even if it is tacit. A common understanding of a shared living space where you can trust your neighbour to not try to steal you or enslave you is a form of political organisation, even if no interaction between the settlers ever occur. Likewise, a settlement where the strongest people enslave the others is also a political organisation. Also, seasonal settlements where people only spend a few weeks a year also require political organisations to coordinate on the dates and logistics. Monarchy and anarchy are forms of political organisation, just like families, unions and corporations. I would agree if we were talking about _Institutionalised_ political organisation, but this statement would still be wrong: > In terms of proof of political organization, that requires evidence like writing or inscriptions. Other forms of evidence can prove institutionalised politics. For instance, the presence of shared infrastructure, palaces, temples, monuments, royal funerary sites, battles, etc.

voz_ 3y ago

The notion of a pre Westphalian nation is itself a little flawed, so definitionally it doesn’t even really make sense to pose the metric as such, let alone measure it.

coldtea 3y ago
Well, there existed both nations and nation-states, fighting other nation states (often with conscious national sentiment and pride, like any modern era nation). It was not all some blur, just because they didn't have modernity-style institutions.
- bandrami 3y ago
  But particularly the post-1648 notion of compact integrated territory just isn't there in premodern times except in a few exceptional cases, and population counting in the modern sense is bound up in that. But to take a particularly egregious case in the Holy Roman Empire a person might have three legal "existences" from the state's standpoint: one as a mediate vassal, one as an imperial knight, and one as a delegate of the church, and by the thought process of the HRE that was three different "persons" in one body.
  - HDMI_Cable 3y ago
    I wonder if there's religious symbolism attached to this, i.e., I wonder if people in the HRE made an allusion between the trinity you mentioned and that of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
    - consilient 3y ago
      No, three is just an arbitrary number for their example. The point is not the exact number of roles but the fact that the basic legal unit is the relationship, not the person. For instance a prince-bishop might in principle be subject to an archbishop as a bishop, subject to the Emperor as an imperial prince, subject to the King of Bohemia (who was in turn subject to the Emperor) as the holder of a secular fief, and part of the Polish nobility, all at once.

larsrc 3y ago

Well, duh! We hardly know the population of any country more that a few hundred years ago. Even now, some numbers are guesswork - how many Russians have died in the war in Ukraine? That's already an uncertainty of tens of thousands. For older societies, who even counted as persons? Slaves? Babies? Prisoners of war? Outlaws living in the woods? And that's even assuming there _is_ a census. The Domesday Book was quite exceptional a thousand years ago, and even that only gives us a population estimate between 1.2 and 1.6 million (see Wikipedia). Any place with a poorer census or written record (i.e most of the world at the time) would be even more of a guesswork.

qsort 3y ago
> For older societies, who even counted as persons? Even more importantly, who is writing. Julius Caesar defeating seven bajillion Gauls is not a figure that should be taken at face value if the source of that number is Julius Caesar.
watwut 3y ago
> For older societies, who even counted as persons? Slaves? Babies? Prisoners of war? Outlaws living in the woods? Is there any reason whatsoever to NOT count slaves and babies as persons? You can not count them as citizens or adults, but surely they are persons.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  The question is what those older societies included in their censuses. The reason for the census and the definition of a person can vary wildly. Remember that not that long ago at this scale, the USA considered slaves as 3/5 of a person when determining states' populations for representation and taxation purposes.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  Historically, census was typically done for taxation purposes. Kids, homeless etc was just not that relevant since households were taxed. Slaves counted as property, not persons.
- 3y ago

moomin 3y ago

For those of us who only read the headline: this is debunking claims by economists and pointing out they’re building their theories on sand.

cfn 3y ago
And they (the economists) may not be the only ones.
dang 3y ago
Thanks. This is one of those cases where the article is more interesting than its title. I've taken a crack at revising the title, though not a very good crack - it's better to use language from the article itself and I didn't do that in this case. If anyone wants to comb through the article and find a representative phrase that would be more suitable, we'll happily edit it again.
- ianai 3y ago
  I'd add "some" to the prefix it. Econ papers vary widely in quality. The lack of a quantifier could be taken to mean this is the new unrepresentative lab rats.
  - dang 3y ago
    Ok, I've put some up there. Thanks!
- notahacker 3y ago
  Original title was far more accurate than the editorialised one which is extremely inaccurate ("economists" outside the subfield of economic history do not "typically" "rely" on population data for the pre-Industrial Revolution period at all) and seems like clickbait for people to add their middlebrow-at-best dismissals of the field. "Widely used historical population time series mostly guesswork" would be a more accurate title, though you might get a few "water is wet" replies :)
- throwaway154 3y ago

_dain_ 3y ago

we don't even know it for modern countries either. i think it's plausible that the UK government undercounts the population by 5-10%. https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1682676824420253697 https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1682676824420253697

blitzar 3y ago
I can feel that twitter account draining my IQ just by looking at it. "One of Britain's forgotten issues is that the government does not know who is currently in the United Kingdom, in any sense." True if one ignoring the census, or the many registers, national and regional, the 1 surveillence camera for every 10 people watching over us or the many corporate holders of everything from your physical location to your browsing history that they are compelled to report to the UK government.
- pjc50 3y ago
  That thread is not substantially incorrect; the data really isn't very well correlated. You can estimate using things like "number of mobile phone users" or "internet users", but that leaves out potentially large numbers of people. The census and the electoral register are basically voluntary (yes, the electoral roll is mandatory, but not meaningfully enforced at all). Agree that the account is sus, starting from the anime pfp.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    > the data really isn't very well correlated It is however trivial to correlate - if there was a desire (or significant error) deemed it to be so. Of course basing your population estimate off the number of tax returns would "leave out some people" (>90% of the population of the uk for that example). Likewise basing it off the register of all children in schools would ignore most people over the age of 18. Ultiately the issue is that these people claim is rife is - all these undocumented people are getting all the jobs, benefits, healthcare, housing, government grants and school places which ignores the fact that to get any of those you have to be documented and registered on a myriad of systems to access that.

vladms 3y ago

I was expecting though a more comprehensive result on the "bad use" of the data, the section "How Economists Use MJ", mentions ~14 papers (out of how many? out of how many checked? any quantitative analysis?) that will be affected (and anyhow in various ways). This seems to have some educational value to some (economics) authors that rely too much on the fact population is known, but there are many bad assumptions done in many papers, so doubt this (some researchers relying too much on inexact data) is such an outlier.

notahacker 3y ago
In fairness, Maddison's time series which use MJ are pretty much the canonical source for the "look how much things have changed" graphs, and data errors make "look, France was much richer than Poland" sort of comparisons" more dubious[1] But it's also not as relevant or surprising as it sounds, since the numerator of those fractions is also guesswork. They're not dividing accurate figures for the total wealth of European countries to get an inaccurate estimate of how rich the "average" person was, they're actually tending to work the opposite way from scant data on wages, prices and what "average" people owned multiplied by scant data on population to get a wealth of the nation figure[2]. Needless to say, there's a lot of margin for error subjectivity and scope for the introduction of personal biases in those estimates too (not to mention the inequalities and completely different access to stuff that makes adjusting for purchasing power and comparing the wealth of Inca subjects, the average medieval Englishman, the average modern Equatorial Guinean and the average modern Briton from a single GDP per capita PPP metric pretty dubious) Essentially no economic theory (as opposed to economic history) depends on the accuracy pre-Industrial Revolution time series for inspiration or validation, and if you double the values for the period before the exponential growth curve, you still get an exponential growth curve. [1]except to the extent that the figures were guesstimated based on the consensus of historians that country X is much richer than country Y [2] cf modern Nigeria, where we have reasonably accurate census data and an "oops, using our new method of calculating GDP, it seems to have doubled previous estimates"

1letterunixname 3y ago

Edit: Economists are the modern first estate: the statistical clerics preaching the benefits of greed. Now with alternative facts! Old title about 200 years claim: While the Middle East, Egypt, and Greece contain the longest continuously occupied cities, the nations and people who compromise them changed and lost generational memory over the centuries. And few continuous civilizations survive in any meaningful form for more than 250 years / 10 generations on average.

coldtea 3y ago
>the nations and people who compromise them changed and lost generational memory over the centuries Changed yes. "Lost generational memory" why? If you mean "lost direct memory of 2 or 3 millenia ago" sure.
hospitalJail 3y ago
I've started to think about this too. Economics isnt a science, its an orthodoxy of rules and beliefs. Sure there are some correlations that hit true, but outside a few true-isms, its basically a religion.
- toyg 3y ago
  Economics is a science, but a social one. That means that, as much as they try to stuff it with math, economics remains fundamentally an application of loose sociologic principles, which are themselves extremely debatable. The genius is that that bit of casual math instantly insulate economists from their peers (i.e. historians, sociologists, etc), no matter how bogus such math might be.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    The problem is lots of economists at least seem to think that what makes something a science is "using math" rather than "validating or disproving theories via observation". I've even seen people sneer "mere heuristics" at suggestions to try that...

sakex 3y ago

Interesting application of Hyrum's Law

DrScientist 3y ago
Had to look that up. Reminds me of biology and evolution - biology isn't designed it just evolves based on observable properties of systems.

atdrummond 3y ago

ONS has been working hard in the UK to revise their method of assessing immigration numbers, after the previous system undercounted by at least 1.6m (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/24/eu-immigration-uk-underestimated-16-million/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/06/24/eu-immigrati...). Papua New Guinea’s population was significantly larger than thought - closer to 18 million than 9 million. (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507443/amp/Papua-new-guineas-population-doubles-overnight.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11507443/amp/Papua-...) Suffice to say, this is a problem us Economic Historians and many other social scientists have been aware of for some time.

pjc50 3y ago
The UK, unlike continental Europe, doesn't have either domestic registration or even exit passport number tracking. The EU has a much better idea of how many people are legally in Schengen than the UK does about EU nationals.
wolverine876 3y ago
You're concerned about bogus data, and using the Daily Mail as the source of truth for verification?
- atdrummond 3y ago
  The DM isn’t the source and there are dozens of articles that will report the same finding. I’m not going to spend the extra time to find an ideologically neutral “news” org for an HN post when the topic being discussed is generally agreed upon.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Can't place all blame on Economists or any social science. Data Gathering is hard. At some point all data is an estimate.

selectodude 3y ago
We don’t even know the current human population within more than a couple percent. Being at the right order of magnitude for things that happened centuries ago seems pretty good to me.

gdprrrr 3y ago

In other words: Economists don't know about error bars.

drowsspa 3y ago
As a physicist, it might just be my layman's impression, but it does seem like economics people are just putting a list of points in Excel, no error bars or anything. I don't think I've ever seen some error propagation stuff in some Economics calculation.
- huitzitziltzin 3y ago
  As a physicist, I think you probably don’t have enough experience with economics research. (Which is fine! It’s not your field!) Quantification of uncertainty is bread and butter for us! Criticize the field fo relying on null hypothesis significance testing, not for failing to provide measures of uncertainty!!
  - drowsspa 3y ago
    I've seen errors being considered while fitting a model, but not in the source data or when using the fitted data in another calculation. But yeah, I hope it's just a simplification for laymen like me. But the fact that apparently there weren't errors bars in a dataset so important such as population estimatives doesn't give me the right impression
- addcommitpush 3y ago
  They care enough to p-hack [0] though [0] https://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsciences.uottawa.ca.economics/files/1505e.pdf https://sciencessociales.uottawa.ca/economics/sites/socialsc...

huitzitziltzin 3y ago

To be less dramatic and more realistic than this headline: there is a small set of economics papers which make use of an inaccurate estimate of populations way in the distant past. Seriously the fraction of papers in which you see these data used is in my personal experience 0. As a fraction of the total amount of economics research produced annually is probably 10^-6 or smaller. It just isn’t necessary in 99.99999% of papers to make any reference to any national or regional populations 2,000 years ago or more. Also maybe ask the authors of these papers how seriously they take the estimates OR how much weight they ask the estimates to bear in their papers?? “Not very” and “not much” are the most likely answers.

throw_pm23 3y ago
Yes, and the rest of the economics papers have other issues.
dkural 3y ago
The headline itself is bogus, saying "typically", where the real number is a couple dozen out of hundreds of thousands.

mistrial9 3y ago

The opposite appears to be more the story - why did Gates-Meta-FB Research put millions of dollars into post-doc methods to quantify "every school on Earth" or "population density of every 10km area on Earth" ? Their detailed mapping world-wide is well known and documented.. the FB people had some .. excuse me.. cult-like phrases about "nobody is excluded" .. It seems like economic spying with a cover of social goals to motivate young coders, from here.