Tom Womack

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?

According to the CIA Factbook entry for Russia,

Russia imports $15.68b worth of Stuff from Ukraine
Russia exports $11b worth of Stuff to Ukraine

According to the entry for Ukraine,

Ukraine imports $6.88b worth of Stuff from Russia
Russia exports $15.54b worth of Stuff to Ukraine.

There's no possible purchasing-power-parity adjustment that makes these figures make sense; where has the four billion dollars gone?

If you mutter darkly about corruption in the East, consider

US entry says US -> Canada is $213.3b
Canada entry says US -> Canada is $187.1b
Canada entry says Canada -> US is $310.4b
US entry says Canada -> US is $293.6b

which set of entries indicate that a sum of about the GDP of Kenya annually has been statistically mislaid.