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>"When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated," Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. "The relocated population is usually cou

>"When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated," Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. "The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected." Sure, "we've been systematically undercounting population for decades" is a more plausible explanation than "large infrastructure projects in rural areas of underdeveloped countries are a bonanza of corruption".

kristjansson 2y ago
A dollar per dead snake, you say?
- lurk2 2y ago
  I saw this happen on a Minecraft server. It was an economy simulator based out of Sweden or Denmark. The administrator was committed to Keynesian economics. One day he wants to clear a desert to build a new town. To compensate people for working there, he used a plug-in called Shop Chests, allowing users who deposited 64 sand into the chest to receive 100 units of the server’s currency. This was substantially more than the sand was worth on the open market. Since this guy was a Keynesian, he had also built a government marketplace that bought and sold all the major blocks. Rather than spending the afternoon digging, I warped to the market, bought out the entire supply of sand, warped back to the job site, and sold the sand at the higher price. This kind of thing happened a lot with absentee owners who would set prices for their shops lower or higher than the market price. If the owner had set up hoppers underneath the shop chest, you could effectively bankrupt him overnight. It happened a lot with minecarts, diamonds, colored wool, and things like that.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    History often rhymes because we clearly aren't teaching it effectively enough. Every six-year-old schoolkid should understand the Cobra Effect (perverse incentive) and how to recognize it around them and in their own thinking.
  - kristjansson 2y ago
    Which is why the likes of Eve Online employ real-life economists - is easy to get wrong. Cobras aren’t really an arbitrage problem, except in the sense that the reward was (presumably) more than the cost of breeding them.
zamadatix 2y ago
Concerningly, they acknowledge accuracy of the numbers reported by the dam projects under limitations... by only highlighting the opposite, that it could be under-reported by them. I feel like I'm missing a lot for this to have been published but I'd expect such a paper about limitations of existing studies to be especially heavy on what the limitations of this new method might be. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=Limitations%20of%20the%20study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=L...
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  I’ve actually looked into this for a few developing countries, and dam resettlement figures are very likely to be inflated. There’s no actual combination of outsiders going around to every household in every village for even a dozen days of the year to plausibly provide a third party confirmation of claimed residence for each individual. It’s effectively villagers certifying each other that they really live there as a primary residence.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    One of the more frightening things I ever learned was that if the population of China began walking in front of you at a rate of 1 person per second, it would take approximately 31 years for the entire population to pass you. The math, roughly: 1 billion people (there are more now, but we’ll call it an even billion) / 60 seconds ≈ 16,666,666 minutes 16,666,666 / 60 minutes in an hour ≈ 277,777 hours 277,777 hours / 24 hours in a day ≈ 11,574 days 11,574 / 365 days in a year ≈ 31 years. That’s just China. The global population would take around 220 years, with not so much time as to say hello. A bureaucracy can of course delegate census reporting such that the groups become manageable, but it puts a lot of things into perspective when you understand the sheer scale of the human population.
    - VincentEvans 2y ago
      Using your own contrived math - if you have just 30 helpers - you can count population of China in 1 year. Or with 219 helpers you can do the same for world population. In US, for the 2020 decennial census, the U.S. Census Bureau hired approximately 500,000 temporary workers across the country to assist with the count.
pessimizer 2y ago
Are you saying that large infrastructure projects have been systematically overcounting population in order to pay more compensation? That there's an interest in making them seem more disruptive, and as if they displace more people? If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.
- allturtles 2y ago
  The issue is that the availability of money gives people an incentive to be counted, even if they don't live there.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  No, it's the people being resettled who have an incentive to overcount themselves.
- solid_fuel 2y ago
  It doesn't need to be top-down corruption on the part of Dam Corp, LLC. Think about it this way - you and your family live somewhere and are being displaced to make way for a dam, some guy in a suit comes around and says "we'll pay $1000 per resident to move you somewhere else". Maybe your uncle lived at your house with his wife for 5 years, until they moved to the city last year. Your grandmother lived there until she died 6 months ago. So lets say it's just you, your partner, and 2 kids. But, that's a lot of money - do you tell the man in the suit that your house has 4 residents, or maybe stretch the truth to 5 or 6 (your uncle might move back soon, after all)? And remember, corruption often stacks - individuals might add an extra person here and there, but then the local relocation manager adds a few % to get a little extra on top, and their boss adds another few %, and so on... soon you're seeing 25% more people than actually reside there.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    Chekhov, "Dead souls". The scam can go both ways, you need to be local to know how it works and not benefit from it enough to snitch.
    - 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

kristjansson 2y ago

A dollar per dead snake, you say?

lurk2 2y ago
I saw this happen on a Minecraft server. It was an economy simulator based out of Sweden or Denmark. The administrator was committed to Keynesian economics. One day he wants to clear a desert to build a new town. To compensate people for working there, he used a plug-in called Shop Chests, allowing users who deposited 64 sand into the chest to receive 100 units of the server’s currency. This was substantially more than the sand was worth on the open market. Since this guy was a Keynesian, he had also built a government marketplace that bought and sold all the major blocks. Rather than spending the afternoon digging, I warped to the market, bought out the entire supply of sand, warped back to the job site, and sold the sand at the higher price. This kind of thing happened a lot with absentee owners who would set prices for their shops lower or higher than the market price. If the owner had set up hoppers underneath the shop chest, you could effectively bankrupt him overnight. It happened a lot with minecarts, diamonds, colored wool, and things like that.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  History often rhymes because we clearly aren't teaching it effectively enough. Every six-year-old schoolkid should understand the Cobra Effect (perverse incentive) and how to recognize it around them and in their own thinking.
- kristjansson 2y ago
  Which is why the likes of Eve Online employ real-life economists - is easy to get wrong. Cobras aren’t really an arbitrage problem, except in the sense that the reward was (presumably) more than the cost of breeding them.

zamadatix 2y ago

Concerningly, they acknowledge accuracy of the numbers reported by the dam projects under limitations... by only highlighting the opposite, that it could be under-reported by them. I feel like I'm missing a lot for this to have been published but I'd expect such a paper about limitations of existing studies to be especially heavy on what the limitations of this new method might be. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=Limitations%20of%20the%20study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=L...

MichaelZuo 2y ago
I’ve actually looked into this for a few developing countries, and dam resettlement figures are very likely to be inflated. There’s no actual combination of outsiders going around to every household in every village for even a dozen days of the year to plausibly provide a third party confirmation of claimed residence for each individual. It’s effectively villagers certifying each other that they really live there as a primary residence.
- lurk2 2y ago
  One of the more frightening things I ever learned was that if the population of China began walking in front of you at a rate of 1 person per second, it would take approximately 31 years for the entire population to pass you. The math, roughly: 1 billion people (there are more now, but we’ll call it an even billion) / 60 seconds ≈ 16,666,666 minutes 16,666,666 / 60 minutes in an hour ≈ 277,777 hours 277,777 hours / 24 hours in a day ≈ 11,574 days 11,574 / 365 days in a year ≈ 31 years. That’s just China. The global population would take around 220 years, with not so much time as to say hello. A bureaucracy can of course delegate census reporting such that the groups become manageable, but it puts a lot of things into perspective when you understand the sheer scale of the human population.
  - VincentEvans 2y ago
    Using your own contrived math - if you have just 30 helpers - you can count population of China in 1 year. Or with 219 helpers you can do the same for world population. In US, for the 2020 decennial census, the U.S. Census Bureau hired approximately 500,000 temporary workers across the country to assist with the count.

pessimizer 2y ago

Are you saying that large infrastructure projects have been systematically overcounting population in order to pay more compensation? That there's an interest in making them seem more disruptive, and as if they displace more people? If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.

allturtles 2y ago
The issue is that the availability of money gives people an incentive to be counted, even if they don't live there.
kmeisthax 2y ago
No, it's the people being resettled who have an incentive to overcount themselves.
solid_fuel 2y ago
It doesn't need to be top-down corruption on the part of Dam Corp, LLC. Think about it this way - you and your family live somewhere and are being displaced to make way for a dam, some guy in a suit comes around and says "we'll pay $1000 per resident to move you somewhere else". Maybe your uncle lived at your house with his wife for 5 years, until they moved to the city last year. Your grandmother lived there until she died 6 months ago. So lets say it's just you, your partner, and 2 kids. But, that's a lot of money - do you tell the man in the suit that your house has 4 residents, or maybe stretch the truth to 5 or 6 (your uncle might move back soon, after all)? And remember, corruption often stacks - individuals might add an extra person here and there, but then the local relocation manager adds a few % to get a little extra on top, and their boss adds another few %, and so on... soon you're seeing 25% more people than actually reside there.
- Muromec 2y ago
  Chekhov, "Dead souls". The scam can go both ways, you need to be local to know how it works and not benefit from it enough to snitch.
  - 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]