World Population, Mapped Clearly

I missed posting this a week or two ago when it was listed on kottke.org: a very cool map of the world, or actually a cartogram of the world, showing the relative population of each country:


The full post that accompanies the map is by Max Roser of Our World in Data.

If you click to check out the enlarged image, you can see that each country is made up of squares. Each square equals half a million people. Hence tiny Canada and Russia make the northern parts of their continents all but disappear, while India and China expand greatly.

Thirteen countries represent 62 percent of the world's population, and seven of those thirteen are in Asia.

Despite that level of population in Asia, "Over the last two centuries the population growth rate in the Americas (28-fold) was much faster than in Europe (3-fold), Africa (14-fold), or Asia (6-fold)." And: "The size of the US population in the 13 founding states at the time of Declaration of Independence, for example."