World Population Cartogram

Today’s post is solely an infographic from the web–but it is a powerful infographic that bears a great deal of attention.  Above are the current nations of the Earth represented by population rather than landmass.  This population cartogram  was created by Max Roser to make people think more clearly about the real nature of the world’s human population.  Each little block represents half a million people.  Countries which loom large in world attention effectively vanish (like Russia, where mismanagement and grief are causing the population to shrink) yet countries which don’t appear in the shrill daily newscasts–places like Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Indonesia–are revealed as titans.  You can find the original in this article (which is fortunate, since WordPress will undoubtedly make reading the version above effectively impossible), along with a number of additional fascinating graphics.   We will talk more about the meaning of some of this later on, but for now it is worth just scrutinizing the cartogram and marveling at a world where Madagascar is bigger than Australia.

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