What distinction are you drawing between government bureaucrats and the scientists who use their data? If the thesis is correct, then most demographers are wrong about the world’s population. The bureaucrats themselves might not be scientists, but the demographers surely are.

This is a thinly-veiled ode to the “trust the experts” paternalism that dominated the early 2020s. This attitude isn’t scientific, it destroyed the trust in the scientific method it claimed to want to preserve, and it resulted in many policies that courts have since ruled to be illegal.