Discussion about this post

User's avatar
DinoNerd's avatar

This is a good skill. But it's easy to pick the wrong numbers.

Let's take your computation about housing vs farmland. Your calculation has some implicit assumptions.

1) All land is created equal. In fact some land is good for farming; some is meh; some is useless. It's common to claim that housing is being preferentially sited on good farmland, not on barren areas. Should the denominator be the amount of potential good farmland in the US, not the total land area?

2) My house is about 1200 square feet, but it comes complete with a decent sized lot, which in typical modern fashion contains lawn, flowers, etc. It also comes complete with road access. So my two person household (in what was once prime farming country) consumes notably more than 600 square feet of potential farm land per person. This is not at all uncommon, though balanced somewhat by those living in multi-story buildings. I'd say this might substantially increase your numerator.

Note that I'm not saying "OMG, we're running out of farmland" - just that your estimates is way too low.

I'd be unsurprised if it were off by more than a factor of ten. But on the other hand, I'd also be unsurprised if it were off by somewhat less.

Expand full comment
Matt Ball's avatar

Population of New York City is 8,550,405 over a land area of about 782 square km. If the world's 7,400,000,000 people lived in one area with the same population density, it would have an area of about 676,819 square km, slightly larger than the country of Myanmar. The world's total land area is 148,900,000 square km, so this megacity would represent about 0.45% of the total land area. (Note that this total area includes Antarctica, which is largely uninhabited.)

Expand full comment
7 more comments...

No posts