And yes, I know that the US population density is not homogenous and that a lot of it is almost empty. As mentioned, the US average is 33.7/km 2 and Belgium’s density is 354.7/km 2. The population density of Iceland is 3.1/km 2. The average population density of the entire European Union, including a lot of Eastern European countries most Americans couldn’t find on a map, is about the same as that of France, 116.2/km 2 3.5 times as high as the US average. All US states outside the top ten have population densities well below 100/km 2, so note that even though Spain and France are relatively sparcely populated in a Western European context, France would be well within the top 10 and Spain just outside top 10 if the two countries were US states. Americans like to use the expression ‘France and Germany’, but at least in terms of population density, there’s a huge difference between these two countries that I’m not sure they’re aware of: The population density of France is much lower (116/km 2) than that of Germany, and rather more comparable to that of Spain (93/km 2). Italy is at 201.2/km 2, between Delaware and Maryland – it would be on the top 6 if it was a US state. The population density of Great Britain is 277/km 2, comparable to Connecticut’s (285.0/km 2) – the state of Connecticut is btw. The population density of Germany (229/km 2) is comparable to that of Maryland (229.7/km 2), which is in the US top five – Germany is almost 7 times as densely populated as ‘the US as a whole’. The population density of Massachusetts is somewhat lower than both Belgium’s (354.7/km 2) and Netherlands’ (403/km 2). If you scale that up by a factor of ten, you get to the third most densely populated state, Massachusetts (324.1 /km 2). The population density of the United States as a whole is 33,7/km 2. If you do find areas that match on this metric, odds are they don’t exactly match on other key metrics. But it’s really hard to find good matches here, in particular due to the problem with population density differences. The (smaller) combined populations of Texas (25,1) and Arizona (6,4) have roughly a million square kilometers to deal with.ĭoes it make better sense to compare Texas with France? And those small countries with, say, the state of New York? It probably would. If you combine the populations of Netherlands (16,85), Denmark (5,5) and Belgium (11 mill), those 33 million people are distributed over an area of ~115.000 km 2.
The Netherlands’ population is estimated at 16.85 million. Now, Arizona is another southern US state with an area of 295,254 km 2 and a population of 6,4 million people. The lenght and width of Texas are both in the neighbourhood of ~1,250 km. If you take a trip in Europe from Venezia, Italy to Amsterdam, Netherlands, you’ll travel ~1200-1300 kilometers depending on the route. Maybe the scales aren’t completely similar, but they’re actually not really that far off: The red bit in the picture below is larger than any country in Europe which is not Russia (or another way to visualize it: That bit is actually significantly larger than the Iberian Peninsula in the map above). Some more random numbers, I used wikipedia’s numbers and I couldn’t be bothered to add links because it would have taken forever and nobody would follow them anyway – you can look it up if something sounds really wrong. The area of the United States is 9.83 million km 2.
It’s not ‘completely true’, but it’s very close – the area of EU-15 was 3,367,154 km 2 ( link). ‘The United States is 3 times as big as EU-15 used to be, and EU-15 included pretty much all of the countries in Western Europe that people from the US like to compare to their own country (Italy, Germany, Spain, France, UK, Sweden…)’ So, in a comment I left over at MR I noted that: I’ll go into a bit more detail about the differences in this post. People often note that it’s a bad idea to compare small European countries with a country that is so big that it is comparable in size to the continent that the small country is a part of. I've made a few changes to the post at the bottom, but it's pretty much the same post as the one I posted back then.
I posted the post below on my own blog a while back, but a friend of mine suggested that it might be a good idea to cross-post a little bit of my stuff here as well.
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