Have we vastly underestimated the total number of people on Earth?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2472604-have-we-vastly-underestimated-the-total-number-of-people-on-earth/
Have we vastly underestimated the total number of people on Earth?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2472604-have-we-vastly-underestimated-the-total-number-of-people-on-earth/
16 Comments
Ss: A new way of estimating populations has found that we may be undercounting people who live in these areas, potentially inflating the global population beyond the official count of 8.2 billion
Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics.
While the official UN estimate for the global population is around 8.2 billion, Láng-Ritter says their analysis shows it is probably much higher, though declined to give a specific figure. “We can say that nowadays, population estimates are likely conservative accounting, and we have reason to believe there are significantly more than these 8 billion people,” he says.
I would suggest a simple, failsafe solution….
We all just count off…
I’ll start.
ONE!
>A new way of estimating rural populations has found that we may be undercounting people who live in these areas, potentially inflating the global population beyond the official count of 8.2 billion – but not everyone agrees
>Our estimates of rural populations have systematically underestimated the actual number of people living in these regions by at least half, researchers have claimed – with potentially huge impacts on global population levels and planning for public services. However, the findings are disputed by demographers, who say any such underestimates are unlikely to alter national or global head counts.
>Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which dam construction projects caused people to be resettled, but while estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics…
Interesting… but this is only about rural areas apparently (which op actually deliberately edited out in their comment), and there’s a soft paywall too… on the article.
It is interesting that so much of this report depends on research from China. China official government figures for new births are known to be inflated, the result of pressure from the top to make more babies. Perhaps the too-high figures for new births and the newer, more accurate counts for rural populations cancel each other out, and the official figures for overall population are in fact accurate.
I’d be willing to bet there’s at least one person they forgot to count
I’m at that age where I get annoyed easily at writers who bury the lede, so here it is:
>[Josias Láng-Ritter](https://www.aalto.fi/en/people/josias-lang-ritter) and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which dam construction projects caused people to be resettled, but while estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics.
>To investigate, they used data on 307 dam projects in 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia and Poland, all completed between 1980 and 2010, taking the number of people reported as resettled in each case as the population in that area prior to displacement. They then cross-checked these numbers against five major population datasets that break down areas into a grid of squares and estimate the number of people living in each square to arrive at totals.
>Láng-Ritter and his colleagues found what they say are clear discrepancies. According to their analysis, the most accurate estimates undercounted the real number of people by 53 per cent on average, while the worst was 84 per cent out.
Before the 1800s for THOUSANDS OF YEARS the highest number of humans was 100 MILLION.
Between 1800 and current day…. We are at 8.2 BILLION.
NO human has EVER EXPERIENCED THIS. Then add social media, CONNECTED TO BILLIONS all at once every day.
Humans have underestimated how this new world is something no other human in history has had to contemplate.
Here is just one example. In China they had a one child policy, yet everyone wanted a son. So rural families if they had a daughter wouldn’t count her and she basically became a nameless citizen without registration. Then they would try again. This could happen a few times before they had their son which they would register as a citizen.
Additionally the farming families would send their one son to school but have multiple children to support the family farm with only one being a citizen.
I met a Chinese diplomat one time that told me they have no idea how many people live in farming communities. He said they did a surprise census one time and the community they counted had 5x the population they expected. He said they conservatively guess that they could have as many as 250-300M more people than they think they do.
Take this and move on to communities all around the world where agriculture is the main supplement to the lifestyle of their citizens.
We have no idea how many villages there are in Africa or South America.
The world population is a “best guess” scenario of which we will likely never know the real answer to.
The gov wants to build a dam but people will be displaced. Well how many people do we have to displace to build this dam? Nah, not many don’t worry about it. Dam gets built. Some dude in Finland is like hey I think you actually displaced a lot more people than that. China: shut up nerd n look at our sweet dam.
Kind of a biased source. They are looking at government data showing how many people are displaced by dam construction. Governments are going to under estimate that every time as it looks far better to displace less people.
What is meant by “significant” in this context? x.25? x.5? x2?
Yes, I’ve been told its 8 bil for the past 30 years of my life? You know numbers that grow exponentially don’t just stop at 8 bil Right? They kinda quickly keep shooting up…
Based on Twitter accounts there are 175 billion people on earth.
There was an article in [The Atlantic](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/) about how the estimates of the populations of the Americas before Columbus were probably drastically underestimated. [archive](https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/03/1491/302445/)
And don’t even mention the vast mole people colonies
Counterpoint: Local governments in China receive national-level funding based on self-reported numbers of school children. After the last national census they discovered this self-reporting had inflated the number of children in China by tens of millions, over the official count.
China’s official story is that it has ~1.4B people and started to decline a couple of years ago, and will decline by about 50% by the end of the century. Several independent demographers think it’s more like 1B, and declining much more rapidly. The cohort of working-age people is aging out as we speak.