I started watching Drag Race Down Under just out of curiosity—it wasn't that great—and found myself thinking about the national talent pool they could draw from there versus in the U.S. Now granted, this "Down Under" show includes New Zealand, which adds five million people and one more major city, but for my purposes here I just did a 1:1 comparison between the U.S. and Australia.
Australia's population is 25.8 million. And since I live in Seattle, I extrapolated from there to shade in all the neighboring states to roughly reach that same population: the grayed area above comes to about 27.1 million. (If you took away Nevada, it would be 24 million.)
I find it to be a fascinating comparison: these eight states, a slight majority of which are among the nation's least-populated, are all we need to get to, to be equivalent to Australia's population. Of course this could be done with any number of state configurations, although both California and Texas have notably larger populations than Australia just by themselves (Texas, 13% larger; California, 53% larger).
If the grayed area were its own country, though, it would have a fair amount in common with Australia in terms of demographics. Largest city: Seattle (4 million) versus Sydney (5.4 million). Number of cities with 1 million+ metro populations: 5 (Seattle, Denver, Portland, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City) and 5 (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide). Total area: ~798,000 square miles in these eight states versus ~2.9 million square miles in Australia. So, Australia still has far greater area (it's nearly the size of the whole continental United States, actually) and thus overall still has far lower population density.
Getting back to plucking from a talent pool, though, these seem more accurate comparisons as well. Australia has nothing akin to New York or Los Angeles, and even though my love of Seattle knows no bounds, I also understand its resources are far more limited compared to such places. In Australia, their closest analogue to New York is Sydney, which is sort of like saying "Seattle is the New York of the Northwest." (To be fair, Sydney does still enjoy far more iconic worldwide fame and recognition than Seattle does, but in both cases, that comes from being a big fish in a smaller population pond—surrounded by vast swaths of desert.) https://t.co/2hsFosC7tp
