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".
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=L...
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.
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.
If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.
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.
There are certainly some ways that the behavior of countries can be painted with a wide brush, but each country still has unique dysfunctions and strengths. It's very difficult to say anything broadly applicable that doesn't have glaring exceptions undercutting the premise.
This is especially, especially true in places with great restrictions on freedom of the press—Rwanda's image is almost certainly partially fabricated, but it's very difficult to interpret the state of affairs from outside the country.
Corruption is certainly a constant across all countries, but the form the corruption takes is very dynamic.
Sounds like a suspicious mix.
It doesn't really say in the article.
I thought reading the paper in Nature would give some more insight, but no.
I was looking for at least an estimate of what they thought world population should be, but that doesn't seem to be included in any of the text...
How could a significant amount of people escape that? Is it all in third world countries?
The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region.
This matters, because we live in a world where many people get much of their information only from headlines, and a recurring narrative of "Scientists make mistakes" or "Scientists can't be trusted" has real impact to policy on climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other areas where distrust of scientific knowledge or expertise causes uninformed people to make decisions harmful to their own well-being or harmful to those around them on everything from nutrition to pollution to evacuations before hurricanes.
This is a thinly-veiled ode to the “trust the experts” paternalism that dominated the early 2020s. This attitude isn’t scientific, it destroyed the trust in the scientific method it claimed to want to preserve, and it resulted in many policies that courts have since ruled to be illegal.
Stop pretending that scientist should be trusted. The recurring narrative you complain about is true and it's what separates science from dogma.
Scientists are experts in incredibly narrow fields and almost always speak about topics they have no knowledge of, even more dangerous, they convinced themselves and others that they have knowledge of these topics because they are superficially similar to something they know well.
Stop lying, frankly.
Censuses aren't just counts, they are timestamps of lots of data (education, family, etc) which is often missing, not digitized or not available (you may graduate in a different country, you might be living with someone but not be married, etc).
There's also a privacy/anonimity issue, even when data is available it can be used for very little over than counting.
