How is world population calculated? And how accurate is the number? Is it possible that the number can be entirely wrong?

Question

How is world population calculated? And how accurate is the number? Is it possible that the number can be entirely wrong?

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Answer 1

During the First Margrave War, a near complete count of Nuremberg was made, and the result was a population of 20,000. This is about 4 times higher than 50 years earlier. 300 years later, a census showed there were only 30,000 people.

Go back to 1857 in Minnesota. They were doing a census prior to joining the union. Lawmakers made up fake towns and filled out fake census forms, in order to ensure their party got more seats. They were rigging elections.

Ancient population estimates just make no sense. Even if you take the lowest population estimates, and factor in a fraction of a percent growth each year, you end up with a population that is larger than today. In the past couple hundred years, when we’ve had the deadliest wars known to man, huge population losses under folks like Mao and Stalin, the one child policy in the largest country on earth, and yet we’ve had record population growth.

We’ve long been told that population growth in the past was low due to disease, child mortality rates, and low life expectancy. Yet during this period of rapid population growth, we are seeing lower and lower birth rates in the first world, where low child mortality and high life expectancy are the norm. The world population growth has literally been fueled by the countries with high disease, high child mortality, and low life expectancy. And those are also the war torn countries.

North Korea, with its crazy famines, high disease, malnourished, and under sanctions, has had a faster growth rate than South Korea.

Some have estimated that there were more than 100 million people living in the pre-Columbia Americas. If you just look at population estimates and growth rates for that era, it would mean that *at least* 25% of the world migrated to the Americas 15,500 years ago. The lower estimates are around 8 milllion, which would be about 2% of the world’s population migrating to the Americas 15,500 years ago.