Global population datasets systematically underrepresent rural population

Yeah wouldn't the floodplains shift as well? I looked at local flood plains when I was looking for a house and I don't want to live in a flood prone area.

China replaced a one-child policy with a two-child policy in 2015, which was replaced by a three-child policy in 2021. So, far from getting rid of rules for how many children you can have a long time ago, they relaxed rules for how many children you can have a short while ago. Also, China isn't rural Alaska, it is a centralized authoritarian surveillance state and not the kind of place one can go off the grid and raise a family. Not that a non-vanishingly-small number of people is doing that anywhere, other than by happenstance in the poorest countries where "off the grid" is the default.

No one knows how many Chinese people don't exist on paper and how many have multiple [Chinese] passports. There is reason to think the numbers are very large.

Weren't rural farmer types in china exempted from the one child rules? And all 50-something recognized non-Han minority groups?

China's authority reaches deep down to the community and office level. They have party members embedded everywhere keeping an eye on their neighbors and co-workers. I'd be surprised if they left any big rural areas un-surveilled.

In the US, the bias is the other way: Effectively, the Constitution gerrymanders the US Senate in favor of rural populations. Every state gets two senators, so highly urban states with much greater population have fewer senators per person than rural states with much less population.

That also biases presidential elections, due to the way the Electoral College is calculated.

Salt to injury? I give you props for a nicely mixed metaphor there.

That's only relevant when comparing states with low populations and states with high populations, which is related but not quite the same as biasing rural populations over urban populations. California has way more rural population than Vermont, but Vermont voters are vastly overrepresented in the Senate (and the electoral college).

The bias towards urban populations would be more significant in congressional districts within a state, I reckon.

> A census literally counts every individual. Census public reports are aggregated for privacy.

Is there any evidence of how accurately the US census actually does that job? Having spoken with a number of people who were involved with the 2020 census (mostly on a volunteer, local basis) the answer is not "absolutely every person in the country got counted exactly once". There are a number of sources of error that would seem essentially impossible to fully remediate, due to people being complicated and error-prone and the census being largely self-reported:

- People in multiple households being counted twice, e.g. college students being counted both at college and at home.

- People who refuse to participate (one of the census-takers I know had someone wave a gun at her face when she tried to follow up on their household's non-response).

- People who are transient or disconnected enough from the social fabric that they are hard to maintain consistent contact with. I knew someone involved with taking the census for an urban unhoused population and there was no doubt that they both missed and double-counted people; I'm sure it's even more difficult for rural populations that might be even less connected and even more transient.

It's not hard to imagine that, on net and despite there being rules and processes for handling each of those situations, there ends up being regional and/or urban/rural bias in the final counts.

>A census literally counts every individual.

I'm afraid that this isn't the case; a census is a best-efforts estimate.

There are plenty of people missed for a variety of reason, everything from not wanting to be found, through to simple avoidance. Let alone filling out the forms incorrectly or giving dud answers to the army of amazing people trying to make sense of all the madness.

Edit: realising the above has added to a long list of things that once upon a time I thought were hard-set facts, and nowadays I'm slowly losing my mind over. Coordinates, populated place boundaries, census counts + demographics... I mean, what _is_ an address? Incredibly painful to get to the bottom of that one, at least in the UK where the definition of an address will vary significantly by use case

screams into the void

There is just no way they count every individual. I live in California and was visiting someone in the central valley. For fun I drove some back dirt roads into some hills and there was a small corrugated sheet metal building style settlement with 20ish people hanging around it a ways back in. It really made me wonder how many people are tucked away. Not like a 24 year old kid who gets a college degree and intentionally lives off grid, but poor/uneducated people who eke out a living somewhere off the beaten path.

A census worker wasn't able to get in contact with the people who lived across the street from me. They suddenly moved out one weekend during the first summer of the pandemic and never came back, leaving the house vacant. I didn't know them very well, but the census worker asked me to make my best guess about the ages of each of the adult and child who had lived there.

Did that cause a double count due to them being counted wherever they moved to? Were my guesses correct? Or correct enough? No idea but that's the data the census worker recorded.

And theory and practice might vary. I saw a heartbreaking segment in a documentary about the Three Gorges Dam about a very old couple who were supposed to receive compensation or replacement for their home being flooded. It never arrived. So we got to watch these two people in their late 70s or 80s carry their old home brick by brick up a steep mountain side.

Rural Siberia? There's the famous Lykov family, and probably some others

Systematically and systemically are two different words with different meanings, despite both being related to systems.

The comment you’re replying to is correct in its usage.

Something done systematically is typically done explicitly and intentionally. This may be what the author of the article was implying, but the comment was pointing out that miscounting of the population due to an inability to perform the task is not systematic by definition.