Wrong timescale

Submitted by Milhouse (United States), Jan 5, 2015 at 15:06

In the space of 10 months, then, the Persians increased 10 percent, the Lur 4 percent, the Kurds 3 percent, the Turkmen & Baloch remained unchanged, the Arabs lost 1 percent, the Azeris 8 percent, and the Gilaki and Mazandarani vanished.

Not in the space of 10 months, but in the space of 10 years since the last estimate. Why do new estimates take 3 years to get in? Probably the same backlog that prevents them from reading their email, or at least from replying to it. Updating these statistics is evidently not a high priority, and they get around to it when they get around to it. Cf a similar phenomenon in the World Alamanac's estimate of the world's Jewish population, which remained more or less static from 1938 to 1948, and was then revised sharply downward in 1949. It had simply taken them that long to come up with a new estimate.

For explanation of why Iran's demographics have changed over the last decade, I'd look for evidence of Azeri emigration, perhaps back to Azerbaijan.

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