Historian: In the Drindian Empire, censuses were conducted annually to determine the population of each village  <b> Village census records for the last half of the 1600' s are remarkably complete </b>  This very completeness makes one point stand out; in five different years, villages overwhelmingly reported significant population declines  Tellingly, each of those five years immediately followed an increase in a certain Drindian tax  This tax, which was assessed on villages, was computed by the central government using the annual census figures  Obviously, whenever the tax went up, villages had an especially powerful economic incentive to minimize the number of people they recorded; and concealing the size of a village' s population from government census takers would have been easy
Ttherefore, it is reasonable to think that the <b> reported declines did not happen </b>
The first is a position for which the historian argues; the second is an assumption that serves as the basis of that argument.