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Comment by merryocha | Hacker News Reader

I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.

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I used to do canvassing and yeah, I never believe official stats anymore.

Especially anything that's self reported or whatnot. People lie. People misunderstand questions. No process is perfect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon

Unfortunately, this extends to research studies. My mother enrolled me in the Growing Up Today Study (https://gutsweb.org/). I eventually stopped responding to that, as I couldn't see how any child (or even adult) could answer their questions on estimated food consumption remotely accurately, making the whole thing seeming dubiously ethical.

It's cited constantly in the research on ultra-processed food you see these days.

Lizardman Constant:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address. The last census was in 2001 and then there was also done a big job registering every residences in multi residence houses. The assumption is that we will never have to do a form based census ever again and just use central registries instead.

That may or may not work depending on where you're at.

If for example you have poor compliance with the law then the law is mostly useless (in the US you do have to update your ID in 30 days, but huge numbers of people dont).

And that doesn't count if your country has a huge undocumented population, like some places in the US do.

Most countries don't extend citizenship to illegals. No driver license, no housing, no benefits. They are irrelevant to the statistics- it would be like counting squirrels.

>They are irrelevant to the statistics

"Wow, why are the roads wearing out twice as fast as we expect?!"

Undocumented residents are pretty different from squirrels. They participate in the economy pretty similarly to documented residents. Consumption, transportation, jobs, housing, etc, and all the related taxation and resource utilization.

Would be tough to pull that off in Switzerland, having lived there for a stint. Can’t imagine the tax guys would be that happy.

That seems to assume that immigration and emigration is not a significant factor for your country

> Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address.

Where is this magical land with no homeless people?

In our country, in case you are homeless the address you are registered to is the town hall of the town you are homeless in. It's a bit ironic, but the bureaucracy needs an address and the thinking is that local social services and the town administration likely know where to find you (but of course nobody can keep you in the town).

Poste restante is an option. Or some friend. Or not just updating it. Still that doesn't significantly affect total population count. And with right policies and social housing you can get it to pretty low point. Where the true nomads will pick for example the poste restante.

I'm not sure how they handle people living precariously without stable housing. There's a few, but not that many and most of them have some sort of connection to social housing and might be registered there or they are registered through the social welfare office.

> we just have every person registered in a central database from birth

"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!

A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9 months later regardless of her connection to any official social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted unknown new person.

To the degree that that doesn't happen, it's because a country has spent generations building a giant high trust society with good widely available medical infrastructure and a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good education, mobility, safety.

An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society and only in a few places in the recent past has any country reached it.

> it is better to use that than to go it alone.

frankly I don't think in any even half modern country you can go at it alone. I struggle to imagine how someone would physically manage to evade public authorities here in Germany where schooling is mandatory and any kid not in the education system would sooner or later be caught. There's barely even a place so remote authorities or other citizens would notice you and report you. You couldn't go to the doctor or anywhere really without identification or insurance.

So I think it's less of a function of trust and more simply of modernity, you're not going to escape attention for too long unless you're a trained spy or something

Here's a case from the US: https://radiolab.org/podcast/invisible-girl/transcript

This case would be impossible in Germany because homeschooling there is illegal.

A recent case in the Netherlands involved six children being off the radar of the government their entire childhoods. Not sure if homeschooling is legal in the Netherlands or not but in this case, it wasn't relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruinerwold_secluded_family

"Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?

And how long does it take for that central registry to be informed when somebody has emigrated from the country without informing the government? Five years? Ten?

> "Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?

In e.g. Germany that requires a signed statement from the landlord, and the ability to receive mail at that address. If you can't receive mail at your own address, it'd be noticed and reported within at most 5 years. I actually believe it'd be the national health insurance that'd be the first to notice & report you missing, as having health insurance is mandatory (even if you continue paying them, they'd notice it once they can't send you a replacement card).

How long does it take for the immigrant to want to rent an apartment a car, buy a monthly transportation ticket or get employed?

I was referring to emigrants out of the country, not immigrants into the country.

The Netherlands stopped with the census in the 1970s when computers became viable. You have to report each birth and death to your domicile. It's fairly foolproof because you can't do anything if you do not legally exist.

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