Why would the supply chains that feed and equip them dominate? Food, clothes, and tools all benefit from high per unit efficiency and this reflects real efficiency in less expensive inputs. Even if you mean the transit the huge barges have very good kg per mile (even if filthy bunker oil is the current norm).

For a simple example of this sort of scale efficiency just take a vat of molten steel for one - a larger vat has more volume with less surface area. For a contrasting illustration of an extreme in the other direction, many thimble sized steel vats would be extremely inefficient as they cool off quicker and either need more of them or give it far more time to cool off.

Housing is linked to transit needs as an inevitable knock on effect. The lack of scale is what makes individual cars less efficient than loaded buses.

I would be perfectly willing to consider hard numbers - there are all sorts of counterintuitive truths.

Farming takes up a lot of land. Even the most land-efficient diets in this analysis [0,1] required 0.3+ acres per person -- a larger land area than most suburban houses sit on, even when including the marginal cost of the extra road they require.

[0] (clickbaitish summary) https://ensia.com/notable/which-diet-makes-best-use-of-farml...

[1] (original) https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/jou...

0.3+ acres per person times a billion people is about the size of europe.

Depending on how you count it, it's definitely within a small constant multiple. A ton of global land goes toward food production. In somewhat more detail:

It's about 27% of the way there (assuming europe == EU). Multiply by 7.8B people and you get 2.1B acres, compared with the 2.3B acres actually used worldwide.

Those numbers might look a little fishy (2.1B should be a hard lower bound, and the upper bounds were >2 acres per person), but the low figure of 2.3B acres in actual use is roughly explained by:

- 9% of the world is malnourished

- Meat and other high-land-use foods make up well under 20% of the global diet (on average more concentrated in wealthier, lower population nations).

- Not all of that meat comes from the land, skewing the exact metrics being used a bit.

I'm sure the 0.3+ acre estimate isn't perfect (back of the envelope calculations suggest soybeans can supply the requisite calories in 0.15 acres, and your other nutrients can be furnished in 0.05 acres), but it definitely appears to be in the right ballpark.