The dead don´t report themselves

 

- Humans? You mean my evolutionary next cousins?
No, I haven´t seen them since the Holocene...

From a comment by "Brendhelm" over at JMG´s Ecosophia blog just now.  

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If China’s population is in fact only 790 million, that’s effectively a more than 7% reduction in the notional WORLD population.

And that assumes the figures for everyone else are accurate, which I’m skeptical of. Third-world countries probably aren’t conducting robust censuses, meaning these data are likely coming from overly optimistic U.N. projections; plus, if they’re receiving aid that’s at least partly per capita, they may have incentive to elevate the “capita”. Meanwhile, Western countries have several reasons why death reporting may be understated:

1. Social Security or similar benefits due a deceased but notionally alive spouse/parent now flow to you if you have a joint bank account, power of attorney, or can otherwise access the deceased’s accounts.

2. If representation is tied to population, as with the U.S. House of Representatives, states (provinces, regions, etc.) have incentive to goose population figures. Underreporting deaths is easier to do than overreporting births.

3. The dead don’t report themselves as dead, so even if everyone involved is being completely honest, there’s a lag that you don’t see as often in births. A person who lives alone with no nearby family and whose recurring monthly payments are all automated may not be discovered as dead for months or even years, until either the sheriff comes by to evict or the neighbors complain enough about the stench.

4. Illegal/undocumented immigration is hard to give exact figures for, because that’s more or less what “undocumented” implies, but both sides of the argument have an incentive to overestimate. Advocates might want to overestimate so as to skim off any excess aid granted per capita; detractors might want to overestimate so as to stoke greater fears and insinuate it’s a bigger issue than it is. Moreover, deaths among illegal immigrants also often go unreported

About the time the world “officially” hit 8 billion population (a mark that if these leaked Chinese figures are accurate, it hasn’t yet and may well never), I had – and, I think, posted in the open thread on the other blog at the time, a sense that it hadn’t and that in fact global population had already peaked. It’s a subtle thing, barely noticeable especially in heavy traffic, but it feels like the world is growing ever gradually emptier of people.. 

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