[HN Gopher] Global population datasets systematically underrepre...
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Global population datasets systematically underrepresent rural
population
Author : croes
Score : 119 points
Date : 2025-03-18 11:50 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| wongarsu wrote:
| Because of the nature of the data (resettlements for dam
| construction) two thirds of the data is from China. But
| interestingly according to Figure 7 [1] the discrepancy exists
| even in countries with normally very meticulous record keeping,
| like Sweden and Germany. I find this surprising.
|
| The root cause analysis also falls short for those cases:
| Germany's bureaucracy might be underfunded but fundamentally
| requires every resident to register at their place of residence.
| There is also no large-scale conflict or violence in Germany, no
| regions are really remote or hard to reach, all rural areas are
| electrified (important for satellite-based night-time light
| counting by GRUMP and WorldPop). The only satisfying root causes
| left are about satellite counting methods being too coarse or
| badly tuned to accurately count rural area, or rural living
| patterns possibly not fitting the assumptions of these models.
| But it's weird that these errors are so similar between so many
| different methods, not all of which even use satellite data
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7/figures/7
| MarkusQ wrote:
| They assume that people were only relocated from the areas
| later covered by water. It seems quite plausible that the
| actual area of relocation was somewhat larger than that
| subsequently covered by water, which could explain the results.
| hinkley wrote:
| China got rid of their rules for how many children you can have
| a long time ago but I suspect such trauma doesn't leave a
| population easily.
|
| In a world where people are considered illegal, you'll have
| lots of people trying to leave no footprints and far away from
| seats of authority where your odds of drawing attention on
| accident are much better.
|
| See also the trope of the quiet stranger who moves to a rural
| town and keeps to himself. Does he just like the peace and
| quiet or is there a warrant out for his arrest in South
| Carolina?
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| China replaced a one-child policy with a two-child policy in
| 2015, which was replaced by a three-child policy in 2021. So,
| far from getting rid of rules for how many children you can
| have a long time ago, they relaxed rules for how many
| children you can have a short while ago. Also, China isn't
| rural Alaska, it is a centralized authoritarian surveillance
| state and not the kind of place one can go off the grid and
| raise a family. Not that a non-vanishingly-small number of
| people is doing that anywhere, other than by happenstance in
| the poorest countries where "off the grid" is the default.
| lelandfe wrote:
| The three-child policy was lifted just months later after
| some outcry: https://fortune.com/2021/07/21/china-three-
| child-policy-decl...
| RegnisGnaw wrote:
| Its actually not that uncommon. China is not a monolithic
| entity. Rules are flexible and always have work around. In
| some cases, rural families that have a girl as a first kid
| will try again for a boy. They just don't register the girl
| for hukou.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you study Chinese history you see that central
| governments have never had as good control over people in
| the hinterlands as they wished they did and it's probably
| not that different now.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's been just over a decade since I lived in China in a
| tier-1 city, but back then it was common to hear things
| like rural people would have multiple children, with only
| one registered.
| hinkley wrote:
| When we are speaking of children, time is on another scale.
| An 18 year period creates whole adults from nothing.
|
| 2015 means there are legal 10 years olds that would have
| not been legal before. And I expect some grey area 11 and
| 12 year olds that are surprisingly mature for their age.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| As the saying goes in China "the mountains are high and the
| emperor is far away."
|
| China is certainly an impressive surveillance state but the
| reality is that the geography is so large that it is
| possible to miss things like human trafficking: https://www
| .nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/05/world/asia/xu...
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Weren't rural farmer types in china exempted from the one
| child rules? And all 50-something recognized non-Han minority
| groups?
| foxglacier wrote:
| China's authority reaches deep down to the community and
| office level. They have party members embedded everywhere
| keeping an eye on their neighbors and co-workers. I'd be
| surprised if they left any big rural areas un-surveilled.
| delichon wrote:
| If this is true of the U.S. Census it would imply that
| congressional apportionment is biased against rural areas. So the
| question has a strong political valance and neutrality is not to
| be expected.
| aoki wrote:
| It's not.
|
| A census literally counts every individual. Census public
| reports are aggregated for privacy.
|
| This is about spatial disaggregation of aggregated census data.
| The problem in developing countries (which is what these
| datasets are used for) is that they often fail to run a
| complete census (in some cases, for many decades) because it is
| expensive and/or the government is not functional. So these
| datasets may not be well-calibrated overall.
|
| The US has no problem running a decennial census, aside from
| nonresponse by immigrants, conspiracy theory enjoyers, etc.
| mootothemax wrote:
| >A census literally counts every individual.
|
| I'm afraid that this isn't the case; a census is a best-
| efforts estimate.
|
| There are plenty of people missed for a variety of reason,
| everything from not wanting to be found, through to simple
| avoidance. Let alone filling out the forms incorrectly or
| giving dud answers to the army of amazing people trying to
| make sense of all the madness.
|
| Edit: realising the above has added to a long list of things
| that once upon a time I thought were hard-set facts, and
| nowadays I'm slowly losing my mind over. Coordinates,
| populated place boundaries, census counts + demographics... I
| mean, what _is_ an address? Incredibly painful to get to the
| bottom of that one, at least in the UK where the definition
| of an address will vary significantly by use case
|
| _screams into the void_
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > A census literally counts every individual. Census public
| reports are aggregated for privacy.
|
| Is there any evidence of how accurately the US census
| actually does that job? Having spoken with a number of people
| who were involved with the 2020 census (mostly on a
| volunteer, local basis) the answer is not "absolutely every
| person in the country got counted exactly once". There are a
| number of sources of error that would seem essentially
| impossible to fully remediate, due to people being
| complicated and error-prone and the census being largely
| self-reported:
|
| - People in multiple households being counted twice, e.g.
| college students being counted both at college and at home.
|
| - People who refuse to participate (one of the census-takers
| I know had someone wave a gun at her face when she tried to
| follow up on their household's non-response).
|
| - People who are transient or disconnected enough from the
| social fabric that they are hard to maintain consistent
| contact with. I knew someone involved with taking the census
| for an urban unhoused population and there was no doubt that
| they both missed and double-counted people; I'm sure it's
| even more difficult for rural populations that might be even
| less connected and even more transient.
|
| It's not hard to imagine that, on net and despite there being
| rules and processes for handling each of those situations,
| there ends up being regional and/or urban/rural bias in the
| final counts.
| mootothemax wrote:
| > Having spoken with a number of people who were involved
| with the 2020 census (mostly on a volunteer, local basis)
| the answer is not "absolutely every person in the country
| got counted exactly once".
|
| Do you have any thoughts on how the US census takes your
| insightful comment's points into account?
|
| I imagine it's got to be quite an involved process given
| the vast differences in US geography, kinda blows my mind
| thinking about even basic stuff like age demographics vs.
| taking into account how many people died on census day.
|
| But then - maybe that's too granular and it all balances
| out in the end? Or at least, it does if you use _special
| magic sauce_ the US census has covered?
| DennisP wrote:
| US rural people tend to trust the government less, so I
| could definitely see them getting undercounted.
|
| The census should really have an option for refusers that
| collects an absolute minimum of information. The
| Constitution only asks that people be counted, not that
| they be broken down into categories.
|
| At least it's just the short form now. Prior to 2010, one
| out of six people got the long form, which had ten pages of
| questions for each person in the household. Here's a pdf:
| https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-
| surveys/d...
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| I believe the long form survey you are talking about is
| the acs survey
|
| If you receive it you are legally required to respond.
|
| https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/about/top-
| questi...
|
| Considering cenus data is used to determine
| representation numbers just counting people could lead
| inflated numbers if that information can't be verified.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >US rural people tend to trust the government less, so I
| could definitely see them getting undercounted
|
| Isn't this more complex? Do they mistrust the census
| bureau?
|
| I say this because their mistrust seems to ignore
| politicians who align with their views. The same people
| who control the government.
|
| For example ask a rural person if they trust "Ron
| Desantis" or "Greg Abbott"
| saulpw wrote:
| I'm currently reading The Art of Not Being Governed by
| James C Scott, which is all about how "hill people" the
| world over have much in common with each other: like
| illiteracy, oral traditions, living in difficult
| geographies, frequent moving, different names for the
| same geographic features--these "uncivilized" traits
| deliberately obfuscate themselves and make it more
| difficult to be found, counted, assessed, taxed,
| conscripted, and in general forced into
| submission/subservience to the state they are co-located
| in. "Rural" doesn't quite cover this group, but certainly
| has overlap with it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Trump 45 admin did not prioritize the census and their ramp
| up wasn't particularly good as compared to past years. In
| my city there was like 30% fewer enumerators.
|
| In the US, rural undercounting isn't really a problem
| politically, although it has negative impacts on revenue
| allocation that is population based like sales taxes.
|
| The biggest issue is that poor residents are underreported.
| This is both an urban and rural issue but from a numbers
| perspective impacts urban areas more.
| Aloisius wrote:
| _> Is there any evidence of how accurately the US census
| actually does that job?_
|
| Yes. The Census uses a post-enumeration survey for this
| purpose. They found evidence of significant under- or over-
| counting in 14 states for the 2020 census.
|
| That was considerably worse than the 2010 census, though
| covid might be partly to blame. Still, afaik, there wasn't
| anywhere near the rural undercount described in the
| article.
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/2020-census-
| u...
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A census worker wasn't able to get in contact with the people
| who lived across the street from me. They suddenly moved out
| one weekend during the first summer of the pandemic and never
| came back, leaving the house vacant. I didn't know them very
| well, but the census worker asked me to make my best guess
| about the ages of each of the adult and child who had lived
| there.
|
| Did that cause a double count due to them being counted
| wherever they moved to? Were my guesses correct? Or correct
| enough? No idea but that's the data the census worker
| recorded.
| senkora wrote:
| The census has an official date to avoid issues like this.
| Since they lived at the house across the street from you on
| the official census date of April 1st 2020, the census
| worker was correct to record them at that address.
|
| They would only have been double counted if they
| incorrectly reported living at their new address as of
| April 1st.
| ericmcer wrote:
| There is just no way they count every individual. I live in
| California and was visiting someone in the central valley.
| For fun I drove some back dirt roads into some hills and
| there was a small corrugated sheet metal building style
| settlement with 20ish people hanging around it a ways back
| in. It really made me wonder how many people are tucked away.
| Not like a 24 year old kid who gets a college degree and
| intentionally lives off grid, but poor/uneducated people who
| eke out a living somewhere off the beaten path.
| chris_va wrote:
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/2020-census-u...
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Are the datasets in the study calculated the same way as the
| census? It looks to be satellite data and remote sensing (which
| I'm not aware of the census using) so this doesn't seem to
| imply anything about the census
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| It would have to be quite a large bias to overcome the bias of
| the Senate
| asadotzler wrote:
| Rural Mississippi (O Brother, Where Art Though)
|
| Delmar with companions: "You Wash's boy?"
|
| Child with long gun: "Yessir and Daddy told me I'm to shoot
| whoever's from the bank."
|
| Delmar: "Well, we ain't from no bank, young feller."
|
| Child: "I'm also suppose to shoot folks servin' papers!"
|
| Delmar: "Well we ain't got no papers"
|
| Child: "I nicked the census man."
|
| Delmar: "Now there's a good boy"
| spookie wrote:
| Well, this is the case in a lot of countries. On my home
| country each "state" has a number of representatives according
| to their population, and just the population. This has slowly
| but surely made it so laws are more and more biased towards
| metropolitan areas. From someone raised in a rural area it's
| mind boggling how far this has gotten. I guess this paper adds
| salt to injury.
| switchbak wrote:
| Salt to injury? I give you props for a nicely mixed metaphor
| there.
| renecito wrote:
| "systematically", dude, it costs money, it might not be safe.
|
| There are some rural places in the Mountains in places not so far
| from America where they harass and rape teachers, doctors or any
| government service employees.
|
| The national census always struggles how to safely and
| practically reach those places.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| I think you've made up a meaning for "systematically" in your
| head that does not align with the normal meaning of that word
| or something? It being unsafe and expensive to count rural
| populations is something that would lead to systemic
| undercounting of rural populations, but you seem to be unhappy
| about that word being used?
| modeless wrote:
| Is there compensation given to people resettled during dam
| construction?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Given to people, or given to property owners?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Surely it depends on the jurisdiction
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And theory and practice might vary. I saw a heartbreaking
| segment in a documentary about the Three Gorges Dam about a
| very old couple who were supposed to receive compensation or
| replacement for their home being flooded. It never arrived.
| So we got to watch these two people in their late 70s or 80s
| carry their old home brick by brick up a steep mountain side.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Return to Dust (Yin Ru Chen Yan ) - 2022 has some
| similarities but won't say more (no spoil).
|
| The movie is great and China censorship story worth a
| glance. There no direct critics but it depicts some
| collaterals of rural areas transformations. Also poetic and
| contemplative.
| araes wrote:
| Part that got me midway through was the suspicion (confirmed at
| the end) that maybe the current 8,000,000,000 estimates for world
| population numbers have some rather large inaccuracies.
|
| From the discussion:
|
| > how reliable current global population estimates really are.
| For example, is it possible that global population estimates from
| the United Nations (7.98 billion in 2022) or World Bank (7.95
| billion in 2022), both relying heavily on national population
| censuses, miss a significant part of the world population?
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