In article , Nick Cooper
wrote:


Nick

Thank you for your last post. Very informative. You seem to be well up on
population and census matters. Let me ask you another.

If you have a good system of registering births and deaths, then
strictly speaking, you don't need a census. All the births are registered,
and so are the deaths, with the year of birth of the deceased. So your number
in each age group is simply the number born in that period less the number
died. Every time a census is done, the count got is compared to the number
calculated as above, and up to the 1991 census, the comparison was
reasonable.

But in the 1991 census, there was a shortfall of 700 000, mostly men,
and almost all 16 - 32 years old. The official explanation was that they were
in hiding from the poll tax, then only recently abolished. But even then,
there was a school of thought which said that this was cowardice and we
should face up to the fact that they had gone abroad.

The same was repeated in the 2001 census, only now the numbers have
gone up, because this phenonomenon has been going on longer, and it now
extends to older people.

What can the explanation be? The can't be dead - somebody would have
noticed over a million bodies. Some local authorities claim that it is
multiple occupation in student houses - but didn't this happen before and
some of these men are now a bit old for that kind of thing. Or, as some
claim, have they gone abroad?

What is the current thinking on this?


Michael Bell

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