A lot of population numbers are fake

Summary

Here’s the story of a remarkable scandal from a few years ago.In the South Pacific, just north of Australia, there is a small, impoverished, and remote country called Papua New Guinea. It’s a country that I’ve always found absolutely fascinating. If there’s any outpost of true remoteness in the world, I think it’s either in the outer mountains of Afghanistan, in the deepest jungles of central Africa, or in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. (PNG, we call it.) Here’s my favorite fact: Papua New Guinea, with about 0.1 percent of the world’s population, hosts more than 10 percent of the world’s languages. Two villages, separated perhaps only by a few miles, will speak languages that are not mutually intelligible. And if you go into rural PNG, far into rural PNG, you’ll find yourself in places that time forgot.But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there?The answer should be pretty simple. National governments are supposed to provide annual estimates for their populations. And the PNG government does just that. In 2022, it said that there were 9.4 million people in Papua New Guinea. So 9.4 million people was the official number.But how did the PNG government reach that number?The PNG government conducts a census about every ten years. When the PNG government provided its 2022 estimate, the previous census had been done in 2011. But that census was a disaster, and the PNG government didn’t consider its own findings credible. So the PNG government took the 2000 census, which found that the country had 5.5 million people, and worked off of that one. So the 2022 population estimate was an extrapolation from the 2000 census, and the number that the PNG government arrived at was 9.4 million.But this, even the PNG government would admit, was a hazy guess.About 80 percent of people in Papua New Guinea live in the countryside. And this is not a countryside of flat plains and paved roads: PNG is a country of mountain highlands and remote islands. Many ...