so, most people don’t have any clue of scales involved with economy at large. let’s play a game:
without looking it up, give estimates for the following:
- how many kg of concrete / steel are being produced per person per year (worldwide average)
- how many kg of cereals per person per year
- how many kWh of energy per person per year
-
- what’s the average population density for rural areas / cities?
yeah you’re right, i didn’t think of that.
so my guesses are:
1 kg per day, so 365 kg per year
1 kg per day, so 365 kg per year
2 - 3 kWh per day, so about 1000 kWh per year
about 300 people/km² for rural areas. cities can go arbitrarily high but max out at about 30k people/km². often far less than this, though.
the reason for 300 people/km² is largely that that’s the amount of people who can be fed on that area, i.e. biological carrying capacity, if you fully utilize the arable land (as long as it’s fertile). so it would be 300 people/km² in most of the US midwest but around 0 people/km² in the great desert to the west of that. surprisingly, that’s not at all how people are actually distributed within the US: the midwest is about equally densely populated as the desert, which in my mind just doesn’t make any sense.