[Excelsior]

(03-02-2014 08:35 AM)Rutting Elephant Wrote:  

I am confident that Indonesia's population well outstrips the US's right now. At least 50 million people under age 18 don't have birth certificates and don't officially exist, inflating the "middle class" stats. There could easily be another 50 million adults with zero documentation that they ever existed.

Yeah, this is an issue that doesn't get a lot of attention in the west since we take accurate, quality record-keeping for granted. According to recent UNICEF reports, about 40% of global births are unregistered. Of the births that are registered, 1 in 7 have no proof of it (no birth certificate). And of those who do get that proof, dodgy record keeping/corruption/incompetence probably do plenty of damage (records get lost or damaged, records are kept inaccurately, etc). And all of that is, of course, assuming the estimates regarding the number of unregistered births are accurate. We don't know precisely how many births there actually are so that 40% could very well be an underestimate (merely a count of the unregistered births we do manage to learn about).

Add it all up, and it might not be a stretch to say that close to half of the world's actual population (whatever that is) isn't actually recorded accurately (if at all).

For your typical westerner who carries his/her driver's license as a matter of habit and regularly uses their birth records (social security numbers, license numbers, school IDs, work IDs, etc) to navigate day to day life, the fact that much of the world's population isn't recorded at all (and many of those who are have inaccurate records that are easily fudged, often used improperly and/or regularly lost) is probably a substantial mindfuck.

The more I think about these things, the more I begin to realize what an anomalous bubble the western world (particularly the USA) really is in.