This map — made by redditor Hormisdas — divides the US into five regions, each with roughly the same population as the United Kingdom. It’s primarily a good reminder for our former British masters of their fundamental insignificance in the world, but it’s also a neat way of visualizing the relative size of different American regions:
America is too big. Here’s how to split it into five UK-sized countries.
Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic policy and theory, and conflicts about the right way to do philanthropy.
Hormisdas explains that because there are roughly 4.8 times as many people in the US as in the UK, each of these regions is a smidge smaller than the UK. In 2011, the UK had a population of 63,181,775; Hormisdas made each of these regions have about 61,749,108 people (as of the 2010 census).
Hormisdas has made something of a specialty of these kinds of maps. Here’s one divvying up the US into eight units roughly the size of California (New England/New York is smaller by about 2.1 million people):
Here’s the same thing, but with 12 Texas-size regions (plus a much smaller “remainder” region enveloping Kansas, Oklahoma, and swaths of Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana):
Hat tip to the Independent.
WATCH: 220 years of population shifts in one map
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