Manifolds counting and class field towers

In Burger et al. (2002) [12] and Goldfeld et al. (2004) [17] it was conjectured that if H is a simple Lie group of real rank at least 2, then the number of conjugacy classes of (arithmetic) lattices in H of covolume at most x is x ^{(γ(H)+o(1))logx/loglogx} where γ(H) is an explicit constant computable from the (absolute) root system of H. In this paper we prove that this conjecture is false. In fact, we show that the growth is at rate x ^clogx. A crucial ingredient of the proof is the existence of towers of field extensions with bounded root discriminant which follows from the seminal work of Golod and Shafarevich on class field towers.