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There could be billions more people on Earth than previously thought
- ggm 2y agoI'm a little unsure I believe the scale of this. I certainly think there will be less accurate, less confident numbers. I don't believe this is going to be 30% class errors. I'm thinking China, India and most large economies have other reasons for knowing the population and while Paraguay and some African states may undercount, this isn't going to be as big at scale as they suggest. I think this is going to take quite a few years to settle down. I'd like to see real demographers talk this one out. There are mechanistic ways to assess populations which are less obvious like registered birth and death rates checks across the interval and school registration checks, which were used to validate the claims about deaths in China during the Mao era, and significantly revised the initial claims down. Likewise the holomodor, and Robert Conquests claims about aggregate deaths in the USSR. Post hoc analysis of initial claims made massive reductions in the assertions. So, a new technique like satellite mapping/image processing comes to the table with some population estimate models which drift from the current figures? OK, but that doesn't mean every worldwide economies counts are off, or that the model is right. It has to be a little more robustly tested.