The geography of population

According to the editor of the Brilliant Maps, web site, this circle not only contains half the world’s population, it also contains:

• The highest mountain (Everest)
• The deepest ocean trench (Mariana)
• A majority of the world’s Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Communists.
• The world’s most sparsely populated independent nation (Mongolia)

Below is the circle that contains the largest possible number of the world’s people.  It is not greatly different from the circle that contains the largest possible acreage of the world’s land area.  Geography, it seems, is Euro-centric.

However, the world’s population center – the point on the earth with the shortest average distance to every person on earth – is believed to be somewhere in Central Asia or northern South Asia.

And here is a map that will enable you to figure out how many people live on your half of the world.

If you click on the links, you can get enlargeable versions of these maps.

More People Live Inside This Circle Than Outside It on Brilliant Maps.

How Much of Humanity Is on Your Side of the World? on Brilliant Maps.

Concentrations of people and economic activity

The USA is a big country.  But its population and economic activity are not evenly spread across the country.

Here are the counties where half the U.S. population lives.

Here are counties where half of U.S. economic activity takes place.

And, below, the counties carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016—in blue, of course.   She carried 88 of the 100 largest U.S. counties.

Half the U.S. population lives in 146 counties

Some time ago I came across a map showing that half the world’s population lived in the densely-populated parts of China and India and a couple of the adjoining countries.

The other day I came across an article about how half the U.S. population lives in just 146 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties and county-equivalents.  The 146 counties are shown on the map below.  My home county, Monroe County, New York, is one of the 146.

Compiling a list of America’s counties is more complicated than I would have thought.

The United States has 3,007 counties, but not every American lives in a county.

Louisiana is divided into 64 parishes, which are the equivalent of counties.

Alaska’s unorganized borough

Alaska, when it was admitted as a state, had no county governments at all.  Instead Alaskans have the right to form governmental units called boroughs.  There are 19 boroughs in Alaska, but half the area of the state is an unorganized borough, covering 11 census areas.

There are 41 independent American cities, not part of any county, in Maryland, Missouri, Nevada and Virginia.  And there also is the District of Columbia.

Counting all these the United States has 3,143 counties and county-equivalents.

There are two county-equivalents on the list of 146—Baltimore City and Washington, D.C.

Most people live in or near India and China

These maps illustrate an important fact that I find hard to get my mind around – the immensity of the populations of China and India.   They aren’t just individual countries in the way the USA, the UK and Russia are countries.    They equal or exceed the populations of individual non-Asian countries.   There are provinces of China and India that are more populous than important European countries

Double click to enlarge.

The top map shows that the combined populations of China, India, Japan and a couple of neighboring countries exceed the populations of the whole rest of the world.

The bottom map shows the world divided into equal segments of 1 billion persons each.  They show that the populations of (1) part of China plus Japan and Korea and (2) part of India plus Bangladesh and Burma are equal to the populations of  (3) all of North and South America plus Australia and New Zealand, (4) all of Europe plus western Asia, (5) all of Africa, (6) Southeast Asia including south China and (7) the rest of Asia including western China and northern India.

Double click to enlarge.