7 ms·
Global population datasets underrepresent rural population
- wongarsu 2y agoBecause of the nature of the data (resettlements for dam construction) two thirds of the data is from China. But interestingly according to Figure 7 [1] the discrepancy exists even in countries with normally very meticulous record keeping, like Sweden and Germany. I find this surprising. The root cause analysis also falls short for those cases: Germany's bureaucracy might be underfunded but fundamentally requires every resident to register at their place of residence. There is also no large-scale conflict or violence in Germany, no regions are really remote or hard to reach, all rural areas are electrified (important for satellite-based night-time light counting by GRUMP and WorldPop). The only satisfying root causes left are about satellite counting methods being too coarse or badly tuned to accurately count rural area, or rural living patterns possibly not fitting the assumptions of these models. But it's weird that these errors are so similar between so many different methods, not all of which even use satellite data https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7/figures/7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7/figures/7
- MarkusQ 2y agoThey assume that people were only relocated from the areas later covered by water. It seems quite plausible that the actual area of relocation was somewhat larger than that subsequently covered by water, which could explain the results.
- markovs_gun 2y agoYeah wouldn't the floodplains shift as well? I looked at local flood plains when I was looking for a house and I don't want to live in a flood prone area.
- HPsquared 2y agoFor example if the road to town is underwater, your home is now unusable.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 2y agoChina got rid of their rules for how many children you can have a long time ago but I suspect such trauma doesn’t leave a population easily. In a world where people are considered illegal, you’ll have lots of people trying to leave no footprints and far away from seats of authority where your odds of drawing attention on accident are much better. See also the trope of the quiet stranger who moves to a rural town and keeps to himself. Does he just like the peace and quiet or is there a warrant out for his arrest in South Carolina?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kspacewalk2 2y agoChina replaced a one-child policy with a two-child policy in 2015, which was replaced by a three-child policy in 2021. So, far from getting rid of rules for how many children you can have a long time ago, they relaxed rules for how many children you can have a short while ago. Also, China isn't rural Alaska, it is a centralized authoritarian surveillance state and not the kind of place one can go off the grid and raise a family. Not that a non-vanishingly-small number of people is doing that anywhere, other than by happenstance in the poorest countries where "off the grid" is the default.
- lelandfe 2y agoThe three-child policy was lifted just months later after some outcry: https://fortune.com/2021/07/21/china-three-child-policy-declining-birth-rate-fines/ https://fortune.com/2021/07/21/china-three-child-policy-decl...
- RegnisGnaw 2y agoIts actually not that uncommon. China is not a monolithic entity. Rules are flexible and always have work around. In some cases, rural families that have a girl as a first kid will try again for a boy. They just don't register the girl for hukou.
- thadk 2y agoThe gridded population tools I've used, including Worldpop, seemed to start with the national census data. Only with that do they use the various other measures as a way to subdivide the census data administrative units. I'm not sure if any of the mentioned gridded population tools are substantially census independent. Haven't read the paper yet, but maybe that could be one reason why methods are so similar.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- delichon 2y agoIf this is true of the U.S. Census it would imply that congressional apportionment is biased against rural areas. So the question has a strong political valance and neutrality is not to be expected.
- aoki 2y agoIt’s not. A census literally counts every individual. Census public reports are aggregated for privacy. This is about spatial disaggregation of aggregated census data. The problem in developing countries (which is what these datasets are used for) is that they often fail to run a complete census (in some cases, for many decades) because it is expensive and/or the government is not functional. So these datasets may not be well-calibrated overall. The US has no problem running a decennial census, aside from nonresponse by immigrants, conspiracy theory enjoyers, etc.
- mootothemax 2y ago>A census literally counts every individual. I'm afraid that this isn't the case; a census is a best-efforts estimate. There are plenty of people missed for a variety of reason, everything from not wanting to be found, through to simple avoidance. Let alone filling out the forms incorrectly or giving dud answers to the army of amazing people trying to make sense of all the madness. Edit: realising the above has added to a long list of things that once upon a time I thought were hard-set facts, and nowadays I'm slowly losing my mind over. Coordinates, populated place boundaries, census counts + demographics... I mean, what _is_ an address? Incredibly painful to get to the bottom of that one, at least in the UK where the definition of an address will vary significantly by use case screams into the void
- InitialLastName 2y ago> A census literally counts every individual. Census public reports are aggregated for privacy. Is there any evidence of how accurately the US census actually does that job? Having spoken with a number of people who were involved with the 2020 census (mostly on a volunteer, local basis) the answer is not "absolutely every person in the country got counted exactly once". There are a number of sources of error that would seem essentially impossible to fully remediate, due to people being complicated and error-prone and the census being largely self-reported: - People in multiple households being counted twice, e.g. college students being counted both at college and at home. - People who refuse to participate (one of the census-takers I know had someone wave a gun at her face when she tried to follow up on their household's non-response). - People who are transient or disconnected enough from the social fabric that they are hard to maintain consistent contact with. I knew someone involved with taking the census for an urban unhoused population and there was no doubt that they both missed and double-counted people; I'm sure it's even more difficult for rural populations that might be even less connected and even more transient. It's not hard to imagine that, on net and despite there being rules and processes for handling each of those situations, there ends up being regional and/or urban/rural bias in the final counts.
- renecito 2y ago"systematically", dude, it costs money, it might not be safe. There are some rural places in the Mountains in places not so far from America where they harass and rape teachers, doctors or any government service employees. The national census always struggles how to safely and practically reach those places.
- plorkyeran 2y agoI think you've made up a meaning for "systematically" in your head that does not align with the normal meaning of that word or something? It being unsafe and expensive to count rural populations is something that would lead to systemic undercounting of rural populations, but you seem to be unhappy about that word being used?
- alphan0n 2y agoSystematically and systemically are two different words with different meanings, despite both being related to systems. The comment you’re replying to is correct in its usage. Something done systematically is typically done explicitly and intentionally. This may be what the author of the article was implying, but the comment was pointing out that miscounting of the population due to an inability to perform the task is not systematic by definition.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago>It being unsafe and expensive to count rural populations Means they would be estimated, surely. Something simple like count the dwellings, match to a similar community that had been counted. Estimation wouldn't necessarily be under-estimation, it could go either way.
- resource_waste 2y ago[flagged]
- Braxton1980 2y ago> Something I recently discovered is that 'higher educated' groups are likely to be brainwashed by their higher education. How did you discover this?
- Qwertious 2y agoWhere is this group of mythical uneducated people who don't have TV or Facebook and don't talk to anyone who does?
- paradox460 2y agoRural Siberia? There's the famous Lykov family, and probably some others
- lo_zamoyski 2y ago> If you had 0 education, and only experiences, you would only have the brutality of nature to refer to. But such a person does not exist, as a big part of what it means to be a parent is to be the primary educator of one's children. You also grow up in a culture. What you're describing are feral human beings, in other words, people who are incredibly developmentally stunted as human beings. > They believe religion[...] and live according to that. This is quite a lazy and sloppy claim. What is religion, first of all? It isn't univocal. The best you can say univocally is something like "worldview". But everyone has some kind of worldview, so everyone is religious. So the question isn't "whether", but "how". If by "religion", you mean a belief in God, then I urge you to look at the historically most important thinkers in history. Very few were atheists. And the atheists with the most intellectual heft didn't dismiss belief in God so casually. That kind of amateurish yucking it up is characteristic precisely of the intellectual halfwits you see among New Atheists. New Atheism is atheism for dummies.
- OfficeChad 2y ago[dead]
- modeless 2y agoIs there compensation given to people resettled during dam construction?
- pixl97 2y agoGiven to people, or given to property owners?
- bee_rider 2y agoSurely it depends on the jurisdiction
- ajmurmann 2y agoAnd theory and practice might vary. I saw a heartbreaking segment in a documentary about the Three Gorges Dam about a very old couple who were supposed to receive compensation or replacement for their home being flooded. It never arrived. So we got to watch these two people in their late 70s or 80s carry their old home brick by brick up a steep mountain side.
- aziaziazi 2y agoReturn to Dust (隐入尘烟) - 2022 has some similarities but won’t say more (no spoil). The movie is great and China censorship story worth a glance. There no direct critics but it depicts some collaterals of rural areas transformations. Also poetic and contemplative.
- araes 2y agoPart that got me midway through was the suspicion (confirmed at the end) that maybe the current 8,000,000,000 estimates for world population numbers have some rather large inaccuracies. From the discussion: > how reliable current global population estimates really are. For example, is it possible that global population estimates from the United Nations (7.98 billion in 2022) or World Bank (7.95 billion in 2022), both relying heavily on national population censuses, miss a significant part of the world population?
- PostOnce 2y agoIt seems like we could get some good estimates based on non-census data. For example cellular data or ad data, rf emissions, CO2 or other chemical emissions, satellite photography of human activity (mowing, cropping, logging, building, etc), food or fuel shipments, etc. A census may miss people, but the rest of the data wouldn't.
- svnt 2y agoAlmost none of this exists for these time periods and populations. Tree cover is mentioned as a problem preventing satellite imagery.
- svnt 2y agoThere is also mentioned the fact that according to their data estimates significantly improved from 2000 to 2010. This could mean that apparent population growth during that period was much slower than it appeared, and instead down to improved measurement.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- instagraham 2y agoIf population level estimates are systematically off, does this also skew any prevalence data or ratios derived from these datasets? For example disease prevalence, lifestyle condition differences between rural and urban, etc
- xbmcuser 2y agoIt could be true but as someone from Asia the biggest thing that came to my mind was corruption. Village head adds 5-10% to his village population to garnish the compensation the process continues for the next 2-3 steps by the time it reaches the payment time you get a count of 20-30% higher than the actual population
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoMost censuses have sampling of responses to verify and have post-enumeration surveys. If that were a widespread activity then it would get found (assuming political/administrative will to do so).
- phtrivier 2y agoNot that I want to riff on the "in mice" joke, but looking at figure 2, it seems like the title should read "systematically underrepresent rural population _in China_", right ? (Some other countries are included, but it seems like China, or at least south east Asia, provides the bulk of the data.) Which is not nothing - if China's population is underestimated, even by a small amount, that means a lot. But there might be purely historical reason ("ghost kids" unreported because of the "one child policy" come to mind) that would not apply to, say, the US census, or the size of constituencies in Europe that would undermine right wing parties.
- OfficeChad 2y ago[dead]
- varenc 2y agoIs there an incentive for fraud during dam construction re-settlement? Like if a family home is being displaced, it might benefit the family to list all possible relatives on the re-settlement even including ones that don’t actually live there.
- commonsenseman 2y agoDid nobody suspect that its not that rural population is underrepresented but the people who want compensation are over represented? There was a dam built in the mountains a few hundred km away from my city and even here people applied for compensation by hook and crook, some enterprising folk specifically installed garages or sheds or hunting cabins or summer houses in the flooded area to receive it.