Essays in Idleness

Back in the old days, when I was ground-mobile and could even ride in aeroplanes, I suffered from an absurd curiosity about the truth. I asked, and have actually continued to ask, sceptical questions. This proved inconvenient for me when I was in high school, but career-limiting and potentially dangerous once I came to riper years. Questions like, “What is the real population of …?” (my favourite example was Indonesia) were interesting to me as a “developmental journalist,” for if this was substantially in error, none of its other statistics could be right. Verily, even chance right numbers at random locations would be misleading.

But my contemporaries were mesmerized by statistics, even when obviously fallacious, like Communist China’s. Consider the number of deaths caused by the Batflu virus. It was something between “normal for the flu seasons,” to ten-millions if you trusted the health authorities. Even the current population of China can only be given as “a multiple of 100 million but not of a billion,” as an old Hong Kong friend explained.

Elsewhere in the world, including the many other countries governed by ideological fantasists (Canada, for instance), population figures are often made up: expanding or contracting at the whim of narcissist-bureaucrats. Proportions, especially of Muslim populations, tend to be inflated everywhere on theological principles. Urban and immigrant populations are often impossible to count, even when the statisticians have honest intentions.

Mortality estimates tend to vary radically, from the truth. In Iran, currently, the number of citizens recently butchered is consistently underestimated by liberal media (“dozens; … up to 1,000 …”). But the kill was 12,000 on the night of January 8th, according to the independent Persian-language news service, Iran Internasnal.

Robert Heinlein famously guessed the population of Moscow — officially five million in 1960 — was actually 750,000, based on his observations of barge and railroad traffic, and the absence of vehicles on the roads. Well, socialism will often have the same effect on appearances. While it now has officially many more zeroes, Heinlein’s wife, the demographic amateur Ginny Heinlein, was among the first to notice that Russia’s population was positively shrinking.