Crowdedness metric

[fivemack]

I've just been introduced, on james_nicoll's journal, to the Gridded Population of the World dataset: some kind demographers have divided the world into six-square-kilometre chunks and counted the people in them.

This lets me calculate the crowdedness metric, which is the average over each person in the population of the population density of the region that person lives in. This means that Canada Russia a country containing three incredibly crowded cities amidst endless desolate uninhabited wasteland gets a figure corresponding to the cities rather than the wasteland; it's about the metric that I imagine people actually using when complaining that their country is too crowded.

High-ranking places: well, of course the city-states of Hong Kong, Singapore and Macao are at the top. The next few are

1. Egypt (mostly desert and everyone lives in Cairo)


2. South Korea


3. Jordan (a small country, but 95% desert)


4. Yemen (ditto)


5. Greece


6. The Philippines


7. Bangladesh


8. Peru


9. Japan


10. Vietnam


11. Indonesia


12. Taiwan


13. Lebanon

A biased sample of countries whose position in the ranking by density and perceived-density is similar:

Thailand, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Singapore, Denmark, Iraq, China, Taiwan, India, Israel, Hungary, UK, Austria

Countries with low density but high perceived density (that is, very concentrated population, or, if you prefer, vast tracts of desolation):

Russia, Gabon, Argentina, Canada, Peru, Australia, Brazil, CentralAfricanRepublic, Surinam, Paraguay, South Africa, Chile

Reasonable-sized (population >4 million) countries with high density but low perceived density (that is, very uniformly spread population):

Serbia, Bosnia, Burundi, Syria, Rwanda, Nepal, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Puerto Rico, Netherlands, Turkey

Jared Diamond writes of Burundi and Rwanda as being pretty much at carrying capacity at tech level, and I could imagine the same being said of Nepal (and Bhutan, which would be on the list were it larger); that's very strange company in which to find Germany. Albania would also be high on the list were it larger; is it ridiculous to imagine Tito and Hoxha as having pursued deliberate projects of decentralisation?

Comments

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

Well...Tito certainly pursued policies of decentralisation, or at least federation; but I'm not sure he had population distribution in mind so much as ethnicity. Though a distributed population certainly has advantages in, e.g., a guerilla war against either the much-missed Soviet Union or the US of A.

Nitpick

[redbird]

Puerto Rico is only a country for international sports events; if Puerto Ricans feel crowded where they are, they can move to anywhere else in the United States for the price of a one-way plane ticket, the same way a New Yorker or Kansan can. (Well, except that they can't drive--but it's cheaper to fly from San Juan to the mainland than from Honolulu.)

Re: Nitpick

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Except that Puerto Rico is mainly Spanish speaking and so they might feel the same reluctance to move that an English speaking person might have in moving to Puerto Rico even though it is US territory. I bet the populations mix much less than for any US state except maybe Alaska, though this is just an off the top of my head guess.

Re: Nitpick

[redbird]

Have you ever visited New York City? A quick google found me an article from 2000 noting that the Puerto Rican population of the city was down by 100,000, or 11 percent. That means there were a million Puerto Ricans in the city proper in 1990.

The last I checked, I lived in the second largest voting precinct in the Dominican Republic.

A Spanish-speaker is not going to feel out of place here, or in a lot of other places in the United States.

Re: Nitpick

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I went and found some numbers. "As of 1990, Puerto Rican-born New Yorkers numbered 143,974." So obviously your numbers are very, very wrong. There were 986,389 residents of New York who were Puerto Rican in ancestry, not who had come there. Additionally there has been significant migration of Puerto Ricans back to Puerto Rico since the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rican_migration_to_New_York

Compare this with the total interstate migration to and from New York.

"In the period 1995–2000, 726,477 people moved into the state and 1,600,725 moved out, for a net loss of 874,248."
http://www.city-data.com/states/New-York-Migration.html

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

How hard would it be to turn that into a table?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It took 34 minutes and 88 lines of perl.

http://tom.womack.net/demog

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Thank you. May I nick some of this for my LJ?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Naturally, that was roughly why I did the work.

Do with it as you will.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I meant to ask: what are the units?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I would say "obviously square kilometers" but the numbers turn out to be odd. 2.87 million for Argentina, vs. 2.78 on Wikipedia. Multiplying Wikipedia Russia area by land percentage gives 14.79, vs. 13.7 in the table. Wikipedia gives 316 km2 for Malta's land area, the table has 586. France: 674,800 vs. 494,000, or 540,000 for Metropolitan France. 9.8 million vs. 8.3 million for the USA.

[oldsma.livejournal.com]

Aw, no Vatican City.

MAO