People always come up with this population-size argument in contexts where it's totally irrelevant[1]. So what if Germany has eight times more residents than Sweden, or Sweden eight times fewer than Germany?!? Everything still works the same, only scaled up or down by a factor of eight: You have eight times more/fewer consumers to supply (with energy, staplers, food, whatever), but you also have eight times more/fewer entrepreneurs and workers to supply it.

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[1]: This moronic argument is most frequently brought up as "Single-payer health care can't work in the US as it does in [insert any country with single-payer health care], because the US population is [X] times bigger!" Yeah, but so fucking WHAT? That just means the US has X times more health care recipients, and an X times larger economy to supply health care! It's just the same thing, scaled up by a factor of X. Sheesh...

It's relevant, but I'm no expert by how much. Sweden has tons of hydro, Germany has none. Scaling infrastructure is hard af.

How is population size relevant to the occurrence or lack of geographic / geological features?