How many people?

This is interesting news. Sometime in the 1980s I began discounting national population numbers. Not rejecting them, just making the assumption that they might not be correct. There were so many incentives for inflating them. Nationalists did it out of pride. Governments did it for World Bank and IMF loan reasons. Military governments did it for regional posturing.

Other countries whose numbers have seemed possibly inflated include Poland (40m), Brazil (210m), Bangladesh (165m), Nigeria (190m), Ethiopia (105m), Indonesia (265m), Egypt (100m). There are many others. Those numbers might be correct. But I think there is a real chance that they may be off significantly.

Ukraine's government finally admits that it's been faking population figures for years. In December, Kiev estimates there were only 37 million in the country. Down from 52 million when it left the USSR, in 1991. In reality, there are probably even fewer. https://t.co/U239DyxCin

— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) January 23, 2020

Even in the US where we have reasonably good numbers, there are incentives to inflate population estimates. Cities, for example, receive allocations of federal money based on headcount and there are a number of cities who historically inflate their estimate of annual population increases in the years between each census and then have to do an adjustment downwards at the end of the decade.