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.
The math, roughly:
1 billion people (there are more now, but we’ll call it an even billion) / 60 seconds ≈ 16,666,666 minutes
16,666,666 / 60 minutes in an hour ≈ 277,777 hours
277,777 hours / 24 hours in a day ≈ 11,574 days
11,574 / 365 days in a year ≈ 31 years.
That’s just China. The global population would take around 220 years, with not so much time as to say hello. A bureaucracy can of course delegate census reporting such that the groups become manageable, but it puts a lot of things into perspective when you understand the sheer scale of the human population.
In US, for the 2020 decennial census, the U.S. Census Bureau hired approximately 500,000 temporary workers across the country to assist with the count.
Thus..it's difficult and expensive.
On the contrary, that is a small percentage of the taxes I pay from a single paycheck.
this. some smart asses would be calling all their relatives, distant-relatives, friends, etc AND claim that they all lived there. then, share the loot(?) like 50%, 30%, 20% etc
the more better approach would be compensating by property, though does have its own downsides
They don't do the opposite: we build here, now let's see how many people we need to relocate.
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.
Cobras aren’t really an arbitrage problem, except in the sense that the reward was (presumably) more than the cost of breeding them.
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.
Except for 1 week. We had basketball tournaments and activities, movies, pizza parties, free ice cream. Wear whatever you want. No ID enforcement.
That was the week they counted attendance to determine how much funding the school got. They even bussed the "bad" kids in from the satellite campus.
All of this security was in response to gangs and general violence of the late 80s / 90s.
So it’s possibly a matter of edge cases in the wheels of bureaucracy than outright graft.