And how much of a margin of error is there? Could we be completely wrong and there’s actually a billion people unaccounted for?
In: 1
There is some margin of error, but not *that* much.
Most governments conduct a census – a count of the people living in that country – from time to time. (Since not everyone can be contacted, censuses usually try to estimate how many people they missed, as well.) To get the world population, you basically just add those censuses up.
Since most of the world’s population lives in cities and other places where it’s hard to go totally unnoticed, censuses are reasonably accurate. The people who get missed are more the people living out in the wilderness in very small groups, which don’t meaningfully contribute to the global population.
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