What countries are the most "overpopulated" or "underpopulated" compared to what their population would be if the entire world had the same population density.
An interesting variant to catch these would be where the over/under population is measured in percentage from the mean rather than absolute value from the mean.
I think doing this purely by total population rather than population density is a bit silly. No one would consider China (at 146 people per sq. km) more overpopulated than Bangladesh (at 1237 people per sq. km). But according to this, China's more than 5 times as overpopulated. And where the heck is Mongolia? It seems like it should make this list very easily with a population of 2.9M and a land area of more than 1.5M sq. km.
If you want countries by population density, try this quiz and this one. About Mongolia, it appears to be missing. I didn't double-check the data on this quiz, but I will now.
It's only silly, I think, if it claims to make a bigger point. Overpopulation and underpopulation both appear in scare quotes and the concept is pretty clearly laid out. I found it interesting.
I really enjoyed this quiz concept. Very cool. I suspect the Australians who drive around with aggressive anti-immigration bumper stickers about us being full would be surprised to discover we're underpopulated to the tune of 391 million people.
Don't use this quiz to argue for migration policies. The concept here does not take into account the climate of each country. For example, Australia is mostly desert so the actual "full-ness" is much lower than 400 million.
Over half of Australia's population lives within the three main urban centres, and most new immigrants gravitate to these centres...if population was spread more evenly across the habitable parts of the country, there would be no overcrowding issues in the cities. This is not a problem exclusive to Australia
It took a while to figure out why this was so counter-intuitive. But realizing it's about absolute numbers and not percentages is the key, I guess. So you can automatically exclude any small countries whether they are densely or sparsely populated. That explains why Monaco and Singapore don't show up. Still it's baffling how Mongolia could fail to make the list.
An odd quiz. It should be made clear in the description how these countries are chosen. I spent my time guessing countries with a high population density.
Easiest strategy I can devise: for "overpopulated" just guess countries that are very populous. For "underpopulated" just guess countries that are huge.
You've misread the description. It's saying that if the entire world had the same population density, then you'd expect Russia (due to its immense size) to have 777 million more people than it currently does.
I'm a bit interested on how you got the set density for the world..
It doesn't seem to be world population / land mass. It's not the median density of the countries and it's not the average. Can you enlighten me on how you got the number for your density?
Shouldn't Denmark be added? Greenland is part of it and is extremely huge. But it only has about 50,000 people. It is very underpopulated, also because it is a whole 2,166,000 square kilometers big.
It doesn't seem to be world population / land mass. It's not the median density of the countries and it's not the average. Can you enlighten me on how you got the number for your density?