alt Hacker NewsOver here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address. The last census was in 2001 and then there was also done a big job registering every residences in multi residence houses. The assumption is that we will never have to do a form based census ever again and just use central registries instead.
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> Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address.
Where is this magical land with no homeless people?
That seems to assume that immigration and emigration is not a significant factor for your country
> we just have every person registered in a central database from birth
"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!
A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9 months later regardless of her connection to any official social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted unknown new person.
To the degree that that doesn't happen, it's because a country has spent generations building a giant high trust society with good widely available medical infrastructure and a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good education, mobility, safety.
An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society and only in a few places in the recent past has any country reached it.
"Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?
And how long does it take for that central registry to be informed when somebody has emigrated from the country without informing the government? Five years? Ten?
That may or may not work depending on where you're at.
If for example you have poor compliance with the law then the law is mostly useless (in the US you do have to update your ID in 30 days, but huge numbers of people dont).
And that doesn't count if your country has a huge undocumented population, like some places in the US do.