A Chinese labourer takes a break from working at a construction site. Credit: Guang Niu/Getty Images
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To understand the world you have to look at it – by which I mean all of it, at the same time.
That requires a map, but what kind? The infamous Mercator Projection presents a highly distorted view of our planet. Land in the northerly latitudes is massively stretched out – Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Europe and Russia all appear much bigger than they actually are. To get an idea of how distorted a map is, compare the size of Greenland with that of Saudi Arabia. In reality, the two territories are almost identical in area. On a Mercator Projection, however, the cold place appears to be several times bigger than the hot place.
Of course, there’s no way of displaying the surface of a sphere onto a rectangle without distortion. Using a globe instead of map avoids that problem. Suddenly you notice things that most world maps obscure. Africa, for instance is really, really big – twice the size of the Russian Federation (which itself is absurdly large – stretching from the borders of the EU almost all the way to Alaska.)
But even an accurate representation of size and distance is misleading. Population, much more than territory, is what makes somewhere ‘big’. Elie Wiesel once said that “we must see in every person a universe”. In that respect even the smallest human settlement is immeasurably bigger than a vast and empty desert.
It’s worth looking at a map that resizes each country according to its population. Suddenly one sees a new view of the world – dominated, of course, by China and India, while thinly populated Russia and Canada shrink away.
But even this exercise is misleading because it doesn’t account for variations of population density within countries. If it did then London would be as big as Scotland and Wales combined. Furthermore, it’s not just the number of people who count, but the number of interactions between them. That’s why cities tend to be more productive per person than smaller settlements, because proximity facilitates interaction.
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