In poor countries, statistics are both undersupplied and underused

IN THE RICH world, people worry that prying governments know too much about them. Popular culture valorises characters who go off the grid, like Jack Reacher (the hero of 25 novels by Lee Child and two films starring Tom Cruise). He drifts around America on Greyhound buses, eschewing a driving licence, credit cards and email. Why does he make himself so hard to find? “It started out as an exercise and became an addiction,” he says.The developing world, however, is full of unwitting Jack Reachers who leave little trace in official records. Their anonymity is not an addiction but an affliction. According to the World Bank’s latest , entitled “Data for Better Lives”, about 1bn people have no official proof of their identity. More than a quarter of the world’s children under five are not registered at birth. Half of the 29 poorest countries have not completed a census in the past ten years—Congo has not done one since 1984—and only 40% have three or more estimates of poverty that can be compared across time. Christopher Yeh of Stanford University and his colleagues have calculated that an African household will appear in a representative survey of living standards less than once every 1,000 years.