I wonder if that number can be adjusted based on the amount of arable land, or based on the ease of construction (quite the nebulous term here admittedly). The number of mountains presumably makes this hard to compare.

America is soooo big and soooo sparsely populated

That is an utterly meaningless statistic. Canada, with four times the population, ranks #233, because most of the country is uninhabited / uninhabitable.

> That is an utterly meaningless statistic

It's very meaningful, when the main argument is population overcrowding.

The entire human population can fit within Los Angelas. It’s not a good metric in general. Pressure on public services, resources and housing is far more useful

The entire human population could stand there: each person would have roughly 1.5 to 5.4 square feet of space—less than the size of a single chair. If you actually did get all of humanity in LA it would instantly break out in war.

Read the rest of the post.

It's completely useless, because you're comparing country area level.

Population weighted density is a better metric for this use case. It's more stable than population density when adding large areas of sparsely populated land, because the denser, more highly populated areas are more heavily weighted. It shows, roughly, the density experienced locally by the average person in some region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_weighted_density

The problem is it's difficult to compare across polities because nobody will agree on the right granularity of parcel size to use (and indeed, it is not really obvious what the right granularity is, and choice of parcel size can drastically change the number).

It's similar to the metrics of "average class size" vs. "student-weighted class size". https://allenschwenk.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/0...

Whichever of the reasonable parcel sizes you choose, it's still miles better than the population density based solely on the territory of a country.

India is 31, Netherlands is more dense than India. Would not have expected that, but then I remember that India has a massive desert, and the Himalayas. So I guess it makes more sense now.