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I doubt the population counts are that underestimated in countries where there's a state authority handing out birth certificates and ID cards. Now how does Ch
by nottorp 2y ago
I doubt the population counts are that underestimated in countries where there's a state authority handing out birth certificates and ID cards.
Now how does China do it? I don't know.
- lstodd 2y agooh the old belief in the infallibility of bureacracy. in reality it's simple: stuff gets so much byzantine that any numbers coming out of it are just hallucinations.
- nottorp 2y agoNot in jurisdictions where you can't do shit without the state issued ID card...
- lucianbr 2y agoGiven a certain place, somewhere in rural China or Congo or wherever, how sure are we it is the case that you can't do anything without the state ID? I for one have no clue. Maybe the reality on the ground is quite different than the theory. And even if it is true. Even here in lets-say-civilised Romania, there's possibly a reasonable number of people who have emigrated but are still on the books. Because it takes effort to remove yourself, and little gain, so people don't do it. And the bureaucracy certainly does not do it by itself. They don't care in the slightest. There are a lot of possibilities. A lot. The world isn't that simple.
- nottorp 2y agoWe just did a census in Romania :) And we have too much bureaucracy. This article is more about countries where they aren’t all covered by a bureaucrat. I doubt that’s China.
- swiftcoder 2y agoAll over the place there are folks living without official documentation. Mostly recent immigrants, but also elderly folks who were distrustful of government when the ID cards were introduced, nomadic peoples like the Romani who may have reason to fear government interference, and so on... Maybe not enough to invalidate the official census numbers, but certainly enough to make them inaccurate
- kazinator 2y agoYou mean can't do shit without a card that looks sufficiently indistinguishable from a state issued ID card.
- decimalenough 2y agoIndia's Aadhaar has reasonable coverage as well. I'm sure neither this nor China's counts are perfect, but there's no way they're off by 53%. If you want wildly unreliable data, Africa is the place to go. The Democratic Republic of the Congo hasn't had a census since 1984, when the population was 31 million, while current estimates are in the ballpark of 100 million.
- michaelcampbell 2y agoI think it's generally considered that China is (charitably) "wrong" by OVERESTIMATING its population. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+population+numbers+wrong&t=newext&atb=v424-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+population+numbers+wrong&t=n...