2025-05-07 20:02:45
Last week Canada held its elections. These were the probabilities of winning for Liberals and Conservatives as of the end of January 2025:
Then this happened:
In the end, the Liberals won. Poilièvre, the Conservative leader, even lost his seat in parliament!
What caused this earthquake?
Trump imposed heavy tariffs on Canada and said it should become the 51st US state. He claims Canada would cease to exist if it weren’t for the US.
The Americans want to break us so they can own us.—Mark Carney, Canadian Prime Minister, April 24th 2025
Is there any truth to Trump’s rhetoric? What should Canada do about it?
The maps we’re used to seeing of Canada don’t fully explain the country. Here’s a better angle:
This makes a few things very obvious:
It’s the 2nd biggest country in the world, and so far north that it’s really cold. This is similar to the biggest country in the world—Russia. This means it has similar challenges: It’s half empty and well protected to its north.
To the west, there’s a huge ocean protecting it.
To the northwest, there’s Russia, but before that we find Alaska. So any threat coming from Russia would first face the wrath of the US.
To the east, there’s another ocean and then the massive and frozen Greenland. Yet another shield.
To the south, it has a border thousands of miles long with the most powerful country in the world.
And as we discussed last time, about 80% of Canada’s population is within 100 miles of the US border.
In other words, this is Canada:
Canada’s first, second, and third priority is its relationship with the US. Until recently, Canada could live with its peaceful relationship with its southern neighbor and the world order it upheld. But the rise of populism around the world is challenging that, with Russia invading Ukraine, China thinking of doing the same with Taiwan, and now Trump’s ideas.
Unfortunately, force underpins everything, and Canada is weak compared to the US. The first problem is population.
The US has 8x more people than Canada. It’s also 13x richer. US spending on the military is 35x Canada’s. The problem is not just the numbers, but how disconnected Canada’s centers of population are to each other.
From a military standpoint, Canada is extremely exposed to the US:
In a war, Canada would immediately lose Vancouver, given all the military bases the US holds across the border in Seattle–Tacoma, and the fact that Vancouver is completely isolated from the rest of Canada by the Rockies.
The US would also immediately go for the cities in the Palliser Triangle: Calgary is 150 miles from the border and Winnipeg 70 miles. Edmonton might be a bit harder to take, 300 miles from the border, but the US military has conquered places thousands of miles away from home, so I guess 300 miles of flat prairie doesn’t sound like a hard challenge. Canadian forces could retreat further north, but they would quickly run out of food and oil.
Indeed, the Palliser Triangle has most of Canada’s oil and gas, so losing that region would mean Canada losing its biggest source of income. And it would be easy to disconnect this region from Canada’s heart in the southeast: This is a map of Canada’s major highways and roads.
This would leave the thin strip of inhabited land to the southeast, but that region is very close to the US, and there are several points that the US could use to invade it. And like with the Palliser Triangle, hiding further north would not be an adventure that lasts long.
Compare this with Russia and Ukraine:
Ukraine has 26% of Russia’s population, not 12% like Canada vs the US.
Most of Ukraine is fertile and produces wheat, so it won’t run out of food if only one part is invaded.
It’s very compact, so forces can withdraw towards the center if the edges are conquered—as it has done.
On its western side, it has mostly allies that can support it.
So where Ukraine can stand its ground against Russia, Canada hardly could against the US.
Another comparison is Russia itself: It’s been invaded many times in its history, but nobody has fully conquered it since it became the biggest country on Earth. That’s because of its defense in depth: Napoleon could reach Moscow and burn it, and Hitler could get close, but Russians could always withdraw farther east, burning everything behind them, leaving the invaders with impossibly long distances to cover logistically. This is because Russia has its population spread across its entire length from west to east, and its main foes are at the ends of this extension. For Canada, the threat crosses its whole extent.
It doesn’t mean the US will invade Canada. It means it could, and it would probably win. And both the US and Canada know this.
They also know that it wouldn’t even take an invasion for Canada to fold. These are Canada’s exports:
And these are its imports:
The opposite is not true. Canada represents only 14% of US’s imports and exports.
So the US could simply decide to cut 50% of Canada’s needs and ~75% of the money it makes abroad, without losing too much itself. Plus, the US could simply blockade Canada for the rest of imports and exports to be shut down.
Canada is self-sustaining for oil and food, so the society could survive a blockade, but its economy would be utterly destroyed.
If you think about it, this is kind of what Trump is threatening with his tariffs. By making imports and exports so much more expensive, he limits both, putting heavy pressure on Canada’s economy.
Until 2022, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia was simply inconceivable. Then Putin did it. Things seem impossible until they aren’t—it only takes the right person in power. Trump and the US are not about to invade Canada. But they could blockade it. And somebody else could come along and do something crazier.
A good Canadian statesman would see all this and think: “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. We need to be on the US’s good side. But we can’t just hope for it to be nice to us like it’s been in the past. We must prepare for a world in which it’s hostile to us. How do we reduce our dependence on the US, in terms of population and the economy?”
My guess is the answer to this is that Canada needs:
More power, which comes from people and money. So Canada needs to
Increase its population
Accelerate economic growth
To connect its existing regions; right now they’re too disconnected and hence weak
To settle new parts of the country
Let’s explore these.
You might have heard about Canada’s recent debate about immigration. In 2024, it received nearly 500k new immigrants—a jump of 70% more annual immigrants vs 2017.
Today, 22% of Canada’s population is immigrant, which puts it up there with other high immigration countries like Switzerland (32%), Australia (30%) and Austria (25%). The US is 15%.
But although this is a lot, it’s less impressive when you take a broader perspective:
Until recently, Canada had not even beaten its historic peak immigration, which was in 1913 with over 400k immigrants. And if you look at annual rates of immigration compared to population size, the recent numbers don’t stand out at all:
Why was there so much more immigration in the past? Because in the 19th century, every country knew that power came from money and population:
The US was extremely successful at attracting immigrants (especially Europeans back then), which made it powerful. Canada had the same ambition. For the same reasons as today.
Canada became a dominion in 1867 and just after that, in 1869, it passed its Immigration Act. From Wikipedia:
At the time, the Canadian government was concerned about expansionist impulses of Canada's southern neighbor, the United States, and sought to increase the population and economic prosperity of Canada to be able to reduce the associated risks. Increasing the population density and development of the Canadian West was considered a strategy for doing so, as the West was seen as a rich source of natural resources and fertile lands. Settling the West would provide new markets for the output of industrial manufacturing in the East.
This was followed in 1872 with the Dominion Lands Act: Like the US Homestead Act, it offered 160 acres of land for free if you could farm it. Then followed the National Policy of 1873, Immigration Minister Clifford Sifton's Immigration Campaign of 1896–1905, the British Empire Settlement Act of 1922… Canada purposefully increased its population, and in 1868 it hoped to reach 100M Canadians by the 1970s.
Reality has been different. Indeed, despite all of Canada’s efforts, the immigration data that I quoted is misleading: A lot of people came to Canada on their way to the US. If you look at net migration, the picture changes:
So Canada is used to welcoming a decent number of immigrants, but historically, it grew naturally through births much faster than through immigration. Now, it’s welcoming even more net immigrants as a share of total growth, all while births have decreased: Canada will reach 500k new permanent immigrants in 2025 because that was the plan, which meant an annual growth of the population through immigration of 1.2%. Last year, Canada’s population growth rate was 3%. If it grew at that pace today, it would cross 100M people in 30 years, by 2055.
Alas, this causes problems.
Because the population has grown faster than housing construction:
High housing costs, concerns about long-term productivity, and cultural clashes have decreased Canadians’ excitement about immigration. Canada will have to overcome these issues if it wants to ever be able to face the US. We’ll talk about some of these in another article, but building more housing is a no brainer. If you want tens of millions of immigrants, you must house them! So Canadians regions1—especially in the Great Lakes & St Lawrence Valley—must fight their NIMBYism2 and change laws to make it easier to build. Mind you, this is an Anglosphere issue:
So if Canada wants to become a superpower, it will have to shed its NIMBY culture and mentality. That is unlikely to come from municipal changes, so new real estate development laws will have to be enacted at the federal or regional level.
Once Canada accepts more immigrants, where should they go for the country to be safer against its southern neighbor? Adding more population to its current heartland is good, but there are better places for people to go.
We saw how disconnected the different population centers are in Canada:
This suggests a few areas in which Canada could increase its population:
It might be hard to settle the coast more than it is today because of the mountains, but it should be easy enough to settle the region between Vancouver and the Prairie: Between the two mountain ranges is the Interior Plateau, which already has some population:
The biggest concentration is along the Okanagan River—the meandering line of population in the southern part of the plateau— but the north is not very populated, despite being quite flat:
Temperatures seem acceptable:
And although it doesn’t rain too much—which might be good here—there’s plenty of water from the mountain ranges on each side:
So this seems like a reasonable region for settlement. This is what it looks like:
But who could finance this? The US:
In the 1950s, the US conceived the North American Water and Power Alliance:
Planners envisioned diverting water from some rivers in Alaska south through Canada via the Rocky Mountain Trench and other routes to the US and would involve 369 separate construction projects. The water would enter the US in northern Montana. There it would be diverted to the headwaters of rivers such as the Colorado River and the Yellowstone River.
The US west and south need more water. That country could pay for this, which would see a massive flux of investment in this area of Canada. The water flowing into the US could pay a steady income stream to Canada. And the US’s dependence on Canada would increase—exactly what Canada should be trying to achieve for its self-preservation.
And water would resolve the one reason why the center of the Palliser Triangle is not populated enough.
We saw in the previous article that all the Palliser Triangle is very fertile and acceptably warm, but only the north has enough rain.
The Rockies get a ton of rain, but most of it flows north:
Canada has many irrigation waterworks, but none that divert water flowing north towards the south.
It would be expensive to build all the infrastructure needed for Canada to fully irrigate the Palliser Triangle—and potentially send some water to the US—but the country should see it not only as an economic investment, but as a geostrategic one. The more food it produces, the greater its population, and the more the US depends on Canada for its water, the stronger Canada will be.
But agriculture wouldn’t be the only way to develop this area. It should not even be the main one. That honor should go to Oil & Gas.
The same inland sea that made this area fertile also blessed it with some of the biggest reserves of oil and gas in the world. Canada is already the 4th biggest producer of natural gas in the world. Its estimated oil reserves could cover 30 years of world consumption, and its trillions of cubic meters of gas are a virtually limitless source. Canada could become the world’s biggest oil and gas superpower, with its resulting income. But these endowments are not exploited how they could be because of politics:
There aren’t enough pipelines and liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals, because of the years of permit reviews, lawsuits, and community consultations. The result is that production must be sold at steep discounts or even stopped.
Federal caps on emissions will require production limits in the future.
Big pension funds, insurers and green mutual funds now blacklist oil‑sands projects. Companies can still raise money, but it costs more, so only the quickest‑payback wells get drilled.
Nearly every new pipeline, road, or gas plant crosses First Nations land, which requires individual consultations and compensations rather than more centralized politics that could solve the problems more efficiently
These are things Canada could streamline if it took its geostrategic goals seriously.
If it did, it should also diversify where it sends its oil and gas. Right now, it nearly all goes to the US.
Canada should build LNG terminals and pipelines that go to the coasts and the Arctic rather than only to the US.
As you know, I’m a big proponent of fighting global warming. But I don’t think the way to fight it is by limiting the supply from developed countries. The only thing that does is make countries like Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Saudi Arabia rich. If we really care about human rights, developed countries should produce fossil fuels as long as there’s demand. The way to fight global warming is by making cheaper alternatives to fossil fuels—like solar, wind, nuclear, or synthetic fuels—and capturing CO2. So Canada should feel free to increase its fossil fuel production.
The biggest weakness in Canada’s geography is this hole in population between the Palliser Triangle and the St Lawrence Corridor, in southern Ontario, on the northern shores of Lake Superior and the eastern shores of Lake Huron:
Although this area is reasonably rainy, it’s very cold:
And it’s on the Canadian Shield:
So few crops can be grown there. But that same Canadian Shield that exposes bedrock means minerals are accessible.
Canada has over 200 mines, including for 31 of 34 critical minerals in US and EU lists. Over 50% of global mining companies are listed in Canada. They account for over 50% of global financing. It’s the #1 miner of potash (for potassium, used in fertilizer), #2 for uranium (23% of global production), #5 in gold, #6 in nickel, #7 in cobalt… And a lot of that is on the Canadian Shield, especially in Southern Ontario.
It’s not just because Canada has some of the best mining reserves in the world. It also has political stability and rule of law, abundant water and energy, and proximity to the US as a stable market.
Further developing this industry would also make the US even more dependent on Canada, as there are many minerals for which the US depends on international markets, including lithium and most rare earths.
But for that, Canada needs to lift some of the obstacles it has on developing mining: build more access to remote areas with major deposits (like the Ring of Fire), streamline permit approvals3, and push more of its immigration towards mining—a win-win for everybody.
Mining is not the only way to develop South Ontario though.
Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa might be well built out, but there’s plenty of room between them. And we don’t even need to go outside of these big cities. The population density of Toronto is ~4,400/km2, and 940/km2 for Greater Toronto. Compare this with New York City’s 11,300/km2. These cities have plenty of room to grow their density. If they don’t, it’s a choice—usually a governance issue.
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (and Newfoundland, and maybe parts of Labrador) are substantially less developed than New England—just on the other side of the border with the US—and even the St Lawrence Valley, inland.
New England is nearly 6x more densely populated, twice as rich, and its main city is 10x bigger than any in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Why is this the case?
The Canadian side is a bit colder, but not by much. Rain is similar. It’s not that. The difference is the mountains behind.
On the US side, the Appalachians create many rivers. The big ones have an estuary that flows to the Atlantic, and big cities appeared at their head of navigation, the furthest point where ships could travel inland. These cities served the entire region, cheaply trading their products with the world. Notably, as their hinterland was made of mountains, they had mining products to trade with the world—timber and furs early on, coal and steel during the Industrial Revolution.
Boston is New England’s perfect example of all of this, but it’s only one of many such cities on the US Atlantic Seaboard. There are also New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia… Each of them traded with each other through their ports, creating a megaregion. They then built railroads to connect with each other over land. All this made the region the political center of the country.
On the Canadian side, in New Brunswick (NB) and Nova Scotia (NS), there is a good port—Halifax—but only one. Every other factor that made the US side succeed does not apply to the Canadian side:
The St Lawrence is a much bigger river, and its head of navigation—Montréal—is much farther inland. It’s also the gateway to the Great Lakes, so all the trade (and population) went there. But Montréal is far from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, so it absorbed much of the trade that could have gone to these regions, rather than complementing it.
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, meanwhile, don’t connect to anything. The US to its south is another country, and everything to the west is better connected via the St Lawrence. These regions are the gateway to nothing.
The political power is in the St Lawrence Valley, farther away from this area.
There are few mountains in these regions’ hinterlands, so no mining products. This was especially problematic during the Industrial Revolution, when much of the timber trade that fueled these regions’ growth was replaced with coal and steel—especially for shipbuilding.
The only big, populated Canadian region that NB and NS could connect to in the vicinity was the St Lawrence Valley, and it was already connected via sea, so there was no point in building a railway.
Although it has a similar amount of rain as New England, it’s a bit colder, so has a lower agricultural productivity.
Instead of creating agglomeration effects in a capital, New Brunswick spread its potential across three cities. St John is the obvious best city given its port. The small towns of Fredericton (the capital) and Moncton are much smaller, yet receive disproportionate funding and attention. The result is that St John is smaller than it could be, which makes it harder to compete with other cities like Halifax or Montréal.
Despite this, this region still has many things going for it:
The climate is mild compared to other Canadian regions, and will only get better with global warming
Natural access to global transportation flows is great. Halifax is the closest major American port to Europe.
The Bay of Fundy, between NB and NS, has the highest tides in the world—up to 16m (52 ft). Good for tourism, great for tidal energy—something the country has not explored enough. It’s also why it has good universities focused on oceanography.
The region has lots of great wind, and could have more offshore plants.
There are fossil fuels offshore.
NB has a long border with the US.
Going beyond this, not everybody needs to be physically tied to the land in an Internet-enabled world. Knowledge workers can work from anywhere, and the people they serve can follow. The average knowledge worker is likely to prefer going to Bali, Thailand, or even Spain—warmer, cheaper countries that are also quite safe—but NB & NS4 have their own appeal.
Yet to compete for this type of crowd, they would need to attract prospects with low taxes and great governance. The region already has a streamlined process to give visas to skilled immigrants, but that’s not enough.
If you take a step back here, the irony is great:
Canada wants lots of immigrants.
Why do they come to Canada? Because it’s a place with rule of law.
There are plenty of opportunities everywhere.
Yet because of agglomeration effects, everybody wants to go to the big population centers.
So you end up with a massive country that’s nearly empty, that needs to populate many regions, but all the immigrants cluster like sardines in a few cities, driving their prices up.
Canada should realize that its big asset is its governance. Seen this way, it should be easy to settle places like NB & NS, which benefit from this governance. Just give a visa for NB&NS to all the qualified immigrants that don’t fit in Toronto or Montréal. That process should be streamlined.5
As for its other assets, there’s much NB & NS could do, like:
More high voltage electric connections to the US, to sell excess energy
Centralize power to create agglomeration effects. Specifically, NB should focus its efforts on St John.
At a federal level, Canada should probably choose between Halifax and St John as the one to develop into a large transportation hub. Right now, both have ports competing for a lot of the same business, and port and train expansions can’t be efficient for both.
Canada has been growing faster than the US in terms of immigration over the last few years, but its economy has lagged:
Canada must grow faster than the US to be able to resist it, and the best way to do that is by better connecting the country’s economy. Canada is one of the most decentralized federations in the world. Its constitution does not explicitly guarantee free trade between provinces. It only signed a Free Trade Agreement between regions in 2017!
As the RBC reports via Chartboot, Canada trades more with the US than internally!
Intra-Canadian politics maintains a network of trade barriers and regulations that impede trade within Canada itself: Each region has its own rules, regulations, and standards, and companies from other regions must also abide by these rules if they want to sell in Canada.
Many trade barriers are imposed to protect local industries, uphold regulatory standards, generate revenue, and preserve jurisdictional autonomy. However, prioritizing narrow economic interests over fostering broader standards across the country has hindered achieving economies of scale, reduced competition, and contained productivity growth in Canada.—RBC
Business groups have long complained about trade barriers among regions and drawn-out permitting processes. It can take years to develop and build mines, oil pipelines, and other major resource projects.
How bad is it? Well, Canada’s average international tariffs are 1.4%, but the internal trade barriers are equivalent to tariffs of 9% to 23%! Eliminating them could increase Canadian GDP by USD 145 billion and expand the economy by 4-8%!
What can Canada do about this?
The Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) made some progress in 2017, but more than one-third of the 334-page agreement consists of listed exceptions by provinces to the agreement.
Canada must eliminate these and other internal trade barriers. It can do this by:
Harmonizing regulations across provinces
Provinces' mutual recognition of rules
Creating common national standards
Creating a one-stop shop for approval processes
Capping emissions, but not the production of oil & gas6
Thankfully, the new Prime Minister, Carney, is doing exactly that:
"We are committing to table legislation by the 1st of July for goods to travel across the country... free of federal barriers. We can more than offset the effects of any U.S. tariffs by eliminating internal trade barriers alone."
According to Reuters, Carney also said he agreed with provinces that the federal government would provide funds to build transportation links to resource extraction sites and develop a "national trade and energy corridor strategy."
Canada is exposed to the US: It has a smaller population than the US, and that population is too close to the border. Unfortunately, the border is not even uniformly populated, and there are big gaps in population that could be exploited by an invading force.
Its exposure is also economic, as Canada’s economy is weaker than the US’s, has been growing more slowly, and has a huge dependence on the US, as most trade is to and from the US.
But Canada can fight this dependence:
It already welcomes a lot of immigrants. It should continue this policy, refining its approach rather than stopping immigration.
That means stopping its NIMBY mentality and changing laws at the federal or regional level to allow much more housing to be built.
It should develop all the provinces that are empty or have economic potential:
The Interior Plateau is empty, but doesn’t need to be. There is plenty of quality land there.
The Interior Plateau, Alberta, and Saskatchewan could benefit from big waterworks that improve agriculture while exporting water to the US, therefore adding a source of exports while making the US dependent on Canada.
Alberta (mainly, but not only) can further develop its fossil fuels industry, if politicians support it instead of hindering it. This would mean even more money and more US dependence on Canada.
Ontario could develop its mining industry further, with the same result of more money and US dependence.
New Brunswick, Nova Scotia—and even Newfoundland—could focus their attention on St John and Halifax, and attract all the immigrants that don’t fit in the St Lawrence Valley.
Finally, it should focus on eliminating all barriers to internal trade.
Canada should stop thinking about itself as a loose confederation of territories in the middle of the wilderness, and start thinking of itself as a potential superpower that must be able to withstand its best friend when it becomes a bully.
Next, we’re going to explore a few fascinating facts about Canada, like:
How does global warming open up options for Canada?
Why does Alberta want independence more and more?
Why is there a line of lakes across the country?
What goes on in the far north?
Why does the US own a big chunk of its Pacific Coast south of Alaska?
Why is Winnipeg such a big city in the middle of nowhere?
How did a single company have such a massive influence in the history of Canada?
How to deal with the immigration problem?
And more! Subscribe to receive it:
Canada refers to its official regions as “provinces” like Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia, and “territories”: Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut. I think “provinces and territories” is too long so I just call them “regions”.
Not In My BackYard
Usually these are due to complaints by environmental groups and coordination with indigenous tribes, both of which could be accelerated with the right federal priority.
And, in fact, the island of Newfoundland, which has a very similar climate. I haven’t mentioned it much because it’s not contiguous to NB & NS, so it’s less relevant to connect its population to that of the rest of Canada, but much of what is mentioned in this section also applies there. Labrador is even farther and colder, so it applies even less. But some parts of it could qualify.
According to this report, another problem is that some residents of NB & NS are basically xenophobic. Not a great way to attract immigrants! This falls in the debate about the conflicts emerging from Canadian immigration though, so I’ll leave it for another time.
Capping internal emissions pressures the economy to turn green, but limiting production is stupid: This will reduce exports, but it won’t pressure foreign countries into transitioning to green energy. It will just reduce Canada’s income, while competitors like Iran and Russia fill their pockets.
2025-04-27 20:01:19
Canada’s federal elections are this Monday, so I thought it was a good occasion to answer some fascinating questions about the country, like why is 50% of Canada’s population concentrated here?
And 70% here?
Why does the average Canadian live in the US?
If there’s a housing crisis in Canada, why don’t they build houses in this area:
What goes on here?
Why doesn’t Canada own this?
Why does most of Canada look like an alien planet?
Why is there a huge diagonal string of large lakes in the middle of Canada?
And more, like why is Alberta so different from the rest of Canada? To fully answer these questions, it will take more than one article, so subscribe to get them if you haven’t yet.
The most salient fact about Canada is how concentrated its population is:
But you’ll also notice something else: There are several centers of population, and they’re pretty disconnected from each other!
What’s going on doesn’t become clear until you see a map of nightlights of all North America:
Where’s the border between the US and Canada?
The same is true for roads:
Even better, look at this map of population density:
Can you tell where the border is? You probably can’t. Let me draw it for you:
If you need to draw a line on a population map to tell where there’s a border, that border does not separate much. Two facts are surprising about Canada’s population areas:
They are indistinguishable from the US’s
They are disconnected from each other!
Over 80% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. In other words: Canada’s population areas are extensions of US population areas!
Of course, this is the biggest reason:
But it’s not the only one:
Why are these precise regions populated, and not others?
Why no more population in between these regions?
Why is so much of Canada empty?
If the two countries are so connected, why are they not a single country?
The answer is here:
Because it causes this:
First, let’s zoom in on the East.
This is why most Canadians live in the east of the country.
Canada, like all of America, was colonized from the east—where Europeans came from. Ships would arrive from the Atlantic, and the farther inland they could go, the better it was for trade. And there are two rivers that travel very far inland in North America: the St Lawrence, and the Mississippi. This is why the map of North America looked like this in 1702:
While Spain focused on its Central and South America holdings, and England on the Atlantic Seaboard, France was trying to control the valleys of both the Mississippi and the St Lawrence, hoping to connect them. It succeeded later that century:
That’s why the French-speaking part of Canada is where it is:
As I describe in How New York Beat Montréal and Québec, Québec City is where it is because it's a perfect point to defend the St Lawrence entrance: It has a big hill that overlooks the estuary, which is narrow enough at this point to be easy to control. Alas, the hills are too high for a good port, so that city could never become the biggest one in the region.
That honor would go to the head of navigation: The farthest point a seafaring ship could navigate upstream. That point became Montréal.
For centuries after that, the British and then Canadians worked to make the rest of the St Lawrence navigable, to reach the Great Lakes, which they achieved in the mid 1800s and continued improving through the 20th century. That’s when Toronto really started to thrive.
But if you look closely, something weird is happening here. Look at the population density again. Why is there so much population south of the St Lawrence, but it stops very quickly north of it?
Of course, a part of it is the cold, but not only that:
The most densely populated areas, in red, are indeed warmer on average, but there are other areas that are similarly warm and don’t have population. So?
A huge reason is the Canadian Shield.
What does the Canadian Shield look like?
It is barren land, with rock sticking out of the little soil left from eons of glaciers stripping it bare.
But the ice sheet covered much of Canada:
Why is only this area so barren? Because of the underlying soil:
The red and orange are the shield. It’s very hard granite rock, over a billion years old, which ice could not easily weather. Ice stripped all the pre-existing soil, leaving bare rock or a very thin layer of soil.
Meanwhile, notice the green area just west of it? That is some of the most fertile land on Earth:
Why is it so crazily fertile?
Because there was a sea here!
Here’s what North America and its Western Interior Seaway looked like:
The remnants of sea life and sediments accumulated there for millions of years. Since then, millions of years of grasses growing and dying there made it even more fertile. The sea, the soil, farmland, and population all overlap:
That’s the Palliser Triangle, where you find cities like Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg.
The west and north edges are more populated than the center and south. Why?
This area is warmer on average than the surrounding region. However:
As we explained in this article, this dry area is caused by the Rockies west of it, which catch all the rain, leaving very little for the prairies.
Notice that the dry conditions of the prairie continue south—that’s why the triangle actually continues further south into the US, and has a lower density of population there:
So in summary for the Palliser Triangle: It’s in the middle of pretty hostile land, with very tall mountains to the west, the infertile soil of the Canadian Shield to the east, too much cold in the north, and not enough water in the south. But the west and northeast edges of the Palliser Triangle have a set of uniquely welcoming features:
Fertile soil thanks to the ancient sea that was here
Warmer climate than its surroundings
More rain than its surroundings, and watered by the mountains to the west.
All this explains why this area is the 2nd big population center of Canada.
The last big population center is on the west coast. But there, the population is even more concentrated:
The population is extremely concentrated in Vancouver. A zoom in on the population density map illustrates this:
About 3M people concentrate in Vancouver and its surroundings. Why not farther afield?
Mountains! They’re on the sea here, while the interior valley is further north and inland than in the US. We can see it in a picture of Vancouver:
We’re now ready to answer our questions!
Why is 50% of Canada’s population concentrated in the lower southeast?
Because:
It’s the warmest
It has plenty of water
The soil is fertile
It has access to international trade through the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence River
This is where Europeans initially arrived
It couldn’t grow much northward in the past because of the cold and the Canadian Shield, which is completely sterile.
Why are there only two other big centers of population?
One is the west and northeast edges of the Palliser Triangle. It has a unique combination of:
Fertile soil, west of the Canadian Shield because it used to be a shallow sea
Warm enough in summer to grow crops
With enough rain and rivers from the Rockies to irrigate the fields
The other one is Vancouver and its surroundings, which happens to be the sole valley that crosses the Coastal Mountains.
Why is the north so completely empty?
It’s not just the cold. It’s also quite dry in some areas, and a big chunk of it is covered by the Canadian Shield.
Now that we know this, we can ask ourselves many more questions:
What are the geopolitics of Canada? What are its priorities?
Why is Alberta such an outlier in Canada?
What’s going on in the north of the country?
What should we do about Trump’s taunting that Canada should become the US’s 51st state?
Why didn’t Canada join the US when it declared its independence from Britain?
What are the craziest moments that determined Canada’s history?
Will Québec ever split?
How many immigrants can Canada accept?
Why does it have such a big housing crisis despite all this available land?
Why does Alaska extend south into Canada’s coast?
Why is there a line of lakes in the middle of Canada?
These are some of the things we’re going to explore in the upcoming articles, some of which will be premium!
2025-04-24 20:02:12
Who is right?
Derek Guy (@dieworkwear) has built an impressive following thanks to his hot takes on fashion, like this one:
Or this one:
But many people disagree with him:
Sometimes, the disagreement gets heated:
There are thousands of rules for choosing our attire. Which ones are true, and which are just preferences? Are there some universal rules that can explain it all? If so, how do we end up with this type of clothing diversity?
Conversely, did these guys coordinate on a uniform or what?
Why so many jeans?
Why are some outfits in fashion shows unwearable?
How do so many communities end up with very narrow clothing options, within which some specific variations are acceptable?
Many have explored this, like Scott Alexander in Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste, but I haven’t found a definitive article that addresses why we wear what we do, so here it is.
Here’s my take: There are four forces that drive fashion:
Function
Aesthetics
Signaling
Path dependency
I think they can explain virtually everything people have ever worn. Here they are, in detail.
People use their clothes for raw functional needs like regulating their body temperature, protecting their skin from sunlight, air, or insects, waterproofing, maintaining hygiene…
Vietnamese nón lá hats are wide enough to protect the face from sunlight around the clock, and conical to function as an umbrella.
The West African Boubou is loose and flowing to promote airflow in hot African climates.
Many cultures across the world invented platformed, wooden clogs, ideal to keep the feet dry in wet and muddy terrain.
And so on and so forth.
Sometimes, we don’t realize the function of clothing. For example, everybody used to wear a hat, but we don’t anymore. Is that because fashion or culture simply changed, as suggested in this episode of Freakonomics?
Of course, that’s not the case. Today, we can be fully protected from the environment, going from enclosed homes to enclosed offices through enclosed cars or mass transit. But we used to spend much more time outside, exposed to sunlight, wind, rain, snow…
Now, for the little exposure we have to the sun, we have sunglasses and sunscreen. The sweatband of a hat could catch beads of perspiration before they got into your eyes, but now we don’t perspire as much, and when we do, we can easily shower.
Meanwhile, hoodies and vests are famously associated with Silicon Valley.
Why? My guess is that it’s a specific result of the weather in Silicon Valley, which doesn’t change that much throughout the year, and is warm during the day and cold at night. As a result, everybody must follow the onion strategy: Wear many layers of clothing so you can take them on and off depending on the moment of the day or whether you’re outside or inside. The hoodie is perfect because you can open the zipper if it’s too hot, or put the hood on if it’s too cold. Similarly, the fleece allows you to warm up a little bit but not too much, and is easy to put on or take off. Both these items are not cumbersome, so they allow you to work on a computer all day long. Additionally, Silicon Valley is a highly meritocratic place where performance can easily be assessed, so status markers are not needed on clothing.
Beyond functionality, some garments are just more beautiful than others. Sometimes, that’s obvious:
These things don’t work well together, but why exactly? There are a few rules:
We like tall people for evolutionary reasons: It’s a sign of healthy food access while growing up and of physical strength, both signals of leadership. Maybe that’s the reason why we find elongated figures more elegant. For that, it’s best if there are not too many cuts to the vertical lines of a body. Unfortunately, here we can see the shoes, the socks, the leg, the shorts, the t-shirt, the neck, a cap… Each layer has a different color, cutting vertical lines too much.
If many pieces of clothing contrast too much, the eye doesn’t know where to go. There is no coherence to the outfit. Compare those with Spain’s King Felipe VI: Broadly the same color for his entire outfit.
There is very little contrast, but the existing one is well used:
Hands must be free anyway, and contrast with the suit. Showing a bit of the sleeves of the shirt there is thus not jarring.
The collar and the tie open up the suit from a narrow point, pushing the eye up towards the wider opening that ends in the face. This shape actually encourages us to look at people’s face, which is desirable.
This is also the reason why Steve Jobs wore black turtlenecks and jeans
The eye barely registers the pants and shirt, which enables the hands and face to stand out.
Obviously, color matters a lot. Red attracts our attention because it’s the color of blood, so we evolved to pay attention to it. Yellow reminds us of the warmth of sunlit afternoons, green for the tranquillity of plants, etc. Complementary colors stand out the most, so people combine them to highlight things.
This is why so many movie posters are orange and blue:
There are a million more color rules; this is just a sample.
You’ve probably seen this image of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man:
It makes the claim that many human proportions follow the golden ratio1. It isn’t really true, but the point stands that many human proportions are close to that ratio: the ratio of the torso to the leg is similar to that of the leg to the entire body, and to the upper leg vs the lower leg, and the lower leg vs the full leg, and the arm to the leg, and the upper arm to the lower arm, and…
Since this type of ratio is common in human anatomy in particular and biology in general, it’s useful for good proportions, which is used consistently in fashion under the rule of thirds.2
We started discussing shapes with Felipe VI, but there’s of course much more to it. One example is that the V-shape of the male body conveys upper-body strength, and is thus preferred. Hence the use of shoulder pads in suits, for example.
In the past, we’ve discussed how the female waist-to-hip ratio is a strong signal of fertility, so crop tops and low-waist pants that show them off are aesthetically pleasing.
Another example I gave recently is how heels are probably aesthetically pleasant because they increase the angle between the back and the buttocks.
Humans prefer symmetry, because usually people who have grown up healthy have more symmetrical faces than those who haven’t. This then applies to garments: As a rule of thumb, most of them are symmetric, including shirts, pants, shoes, earrings… Asymmetries can be aesthetic, but not as a rule: Too much asymmetry will just look off. Asymmetry grabs the eye, so a little asymmetric detail will be the touch that is aesthetic.
There are probably hundreds of other rules. Some you might know, others you don’t, but they exist and have a rational reason behind them. Once you know them, you can apply them.
For example, why are Crocs so unfashionable?
They were designed only for comfort (function) and the tradeoffs have been really bad for aesthetics:
They have bright colors, which break the line of the leg.
They don’t espouse the natural shape of feet, with a big blob at the tip.
They’re made of plastic, which causes the foot to sweat, which smells poorly.
So they have holes to allow them to breathe, which again form a completely unnatural shape, as feet don’t have big dark circles at the top.
But that’s not enough to avoid the sweating and smell, so some people put socks on when they wear them, which further breaks the line of the leg.
Compare Crocs to flip-flops: The foot breathes more so it sweats less and smells less, they let the natural shape of the foot shine (it’s the actual foot!), don’t cut the leg line…
Here’s another example: Aren’t white socks a fashion faux pas? Then why did Michael Jackson wear them?
Didn’t we just say we are supposed to lengthen the line of the body with a single color? Don’t these white socks break the line?
Yeah but that’s the point here, because Michael Jackson wants us to pay attention to his feet! He contrasts the black of his pants and shoes and stage with the white of the socks so we really really see his legs when he is doing the moonwalk:
Or course, that’s also why at some point he added a vertical line to his trousers—to highlight the movement of his legs. And why the rest remained black—to keep the contrast as high as possible. It was all intentional, but he could only break the rules because he knew the rules.
Most people don’t know these fundamental aesthetic rules, so they follow them blindly without understanding their rationale. This means the rules appear arbitrary and people don’t know when they can break them.
The third driver of fashion is signaling. Fashion is a great way to communicate with others because everybody sees it instantly and understands it without even thinking. Arguably, it’s the fastest way to communicate lots of information in person, and people have taken advantage of that since forever.
There are many things we can signal with clothing.
The main one is status. People want to convey that they are at the top of the hierarchy. The most obvious way is through money: If you can burn lots of cash on your clothes, odds are you have more money where it came from. The entire luxury industry is based on this simple insight.
There are other ways. In antiquity, the color purple was very hard to produce: Only Phoenicians were able to produce it, and it required the painstaking work of collecting thousands of sea snails. Roman emperors kept it for themselves, so only they could wear Tyrian purple capes, and other eminent people could line their garments with it.
Yet another example is corsets.
They had an aesthetic function: To highlight a low waist-to-hip ratio. But they also had a signaling function: You couldn’t do manual labor while wearing this, so it would show you had enough money to not work with your hands.
A very common way of signaling status with clothing in the past was through the type of cloth used. Silk, for example, was so scarce for thousands of years that wearing it immediately signaled wealth.
Of course, a variant of status is authority. This is typical in uniforms.
They tend to have some functional aspect, like military camouflage to hide from enemies, or green scrubs to avoid optical effects from blood. But many aspects are decorative, just to convey the idea that this is a uniform, so you should respect the wearer accordingly.
Remember the Silicon Valley hoodies? They might have started functional, but they became a statement, like when Mark Zuckerberg wore a hoodie to Congress.
He was telling politicians: I come from another center of power, and I don’t bow to yours.
Indeed, sometimes clothing signals belonging to a group, not for the sake of the authority, but simply for the belonging: school uniforms, saffron robes for Buddhists, hijab for Muslim women, university clothing, goths, sports team members, traditional dress, branded hoodies for Silicon Valley companies…
Sometimes, belonging to a group that flaunts authority will pick something purposefully ugly. I believe this is one of the reasons why teenagers wear Crocs: They’re comfortable, so there’s plausible deniability that they wear them for that, but another component is to wear something that is considered ugly by adults: See? I don’t follow your rules. And since they’re truly ugly, kids can also signal that they’re willing to stand a public cost (ugliness) to belong to the group of cool kids—a bit like a Yakuza could cut a finger to show they belong.
Some are much more subtle, like wearing brand new sneakers like the cool kids.
Suits look good, but they are also a convention we landed on to show respect: I make the effort to don a suit to show you that I abide to the codes of what is proper attire.
Some of these are probably even subconscious. When you buy jeans, you might not realize that part of it is because it’s accepted as the standard for trousers everywhere. As long as you don’t need casual attire, you know you’ll fit in anywhere.
But we don’t want to just blindly belong because then we are sheep. Within the boundaries of what’s acceptable by the group, we must show our individualism. We might wear jeans, but the specific cut we choose, or the specific color, or the tops we combine them with, or the jewelry or sock and tie color… All these have an aesthetic aspect, but also one of simply being different and unique.
We touched on how some aesthetic aspects of clothing can convey sexuality, like showing the waist in women or the V-shape in men. But clothing can convey other aspects of sexuality, like chastity. This is the point of much Muslim dress code for women: They’re hidden to avoid the male stare (functional), but wearing it also conveys the messages that they belong to the group and are modest.
To me, demonstrating sexuality is the reason why Jeff Bezos dresses like this:
He is conveying that he is a normal guy with his jeans and polo, but he’s also showing muscle, which conveys strength and the capability for violence—attractive to many women.
When you are wearing the latest trendy garment, cut, color texture… you are signaling 2 things:
I can spend enough time analyzing clothing trends, which signals that I have lots of time to burn (therefore I’m not slaving away for cash) and I’m intelligent, because I can discern what is fashionable and what is not.
I can afford to buy clothes that are trendy right now, and change them constantly, along with the trends, which signals wealth.
The faster you catch a trend, the cooler you are. You belong to the inner circle. If you catch the trend one year later, though, you’re seen as someone who doesn’t belong to the in-crowd: You’re trying too hard and yet are too late.
The last rule is that all the rules above create a history that determines the fashion of the centuries that follow. Old social structures, class systems, materials, functions, fads… they accumulate over time and evolve, but vestiges often remain.
For example, we wear jeans because gold miners and cowboys wore and popularized them, even if most of us don’t mine or herd cows anymore. We wear ties because Croatians used colorful pieces of cloth to tie the neck of their jackets, and the French king Louis XIII started wearing them too, devoid of their original functionality. Present-day ties are just the descendant of that.
Why do suit lapels have buttonholes, but only on the left?
They are useless now, but as Derek Guy explains, they used to have a function. Originally, jackets were designed to close at the neck.
But then some people started reverting the collar when they were not closing it.
Eventually, we stopped closing the jackets altogether, the right lapel lost the button, and standard suit lapels came to be, but for some reason the buttonhole to the left remained.
Here’s another example from the same source. This is a Type III trucker jacket. Look at the v-shapes on both sides:
Type III derives its history from the Type I and II jackets, which feature pleats that run parallel to the placket.—Derek Guy
These pleats could be released to make the jacket looser—useful at a time when fabric was precious and ppl wore clothes for decades. When companies came up with their modern version of the trucker jacket, they included a similar detail as a nod to the garment's history.—Derek Guy
We talked about inuit ruffs earlier on. Of course, now we get this:
Is this ruff made of wolf fur so that it can create turbulence in ice cold wind and keep moisture while not freezing with it? No. It’s faux fur made of plastic that probably keeps no moisture and freezes hard. It just reminds you of those older coats, so it gives you a feeling of coziness and warmth.
So we have four forces:
Function
Aesthetic
Signaling
Path dependency
They combine to create impossibly complex rules that are hard to parse, but exist nonetheless, and drive fashion through history. This now allows us to answer our questions from the introduction:
Why are there so many types of garments? Because these rules are very complex and their combination creates infinite possibilities.
Why are there places and times in history where the general fashion was the same for everybody, with only a few differences? Because these places had a specific climate that requires a certain type of garment, those making them specialized in one instance type, and the community would want to keep the “uniform” to show belonging, yet want some differentiation to mark status and individuality.
Why does the fashion guy on the Internet disagree so much about showing muscle in outfits?
In his threads, Derek tends to complain about things like the fact that the polo has no history (path dependency), that it’s shapeless (aesthetics), that this last outfit doesn’t follow the rule of thirds (aesthetics again)... What I think he misses, however, is that a big strong body is now a standout status marker: It’s very difficult to develop this type of body: It takes hours at the gym every day for years on end, so it can’t be faked with money. This is at a time when displays of wealth are both disparaged and unnecessary, as many people know who the richest people are. The result is that men want to use their strong body shape as a status marker, and are willing to go the extra mile to show it. If it is at the expense of wearing clothes that are too tight, it’s worth it for them.
Derek emphasizes aesthetics and path dependency, while these other people focus on force status signaling.
Why do fashion shows feature impossible clothes? Because these garments are not designed to be worn, so function, aesthetics, and some signaling such as belonging don’t matter as much. Their role is to spread virally by creating an image of exclusivity and creativity. This adds to the image of the brand, which can then design more wearable clothes and piggyback on those associations.
What do you think? Are these rules truly enough to explain all fashion? Did I miss any?
And if you are not fully convinced, that’s what the premium article of this week is going to be about: I take a few examples of our most cherished types of garments and show how much these rules have determined them. Subscribe to receive them!
a/b = b/(a+b)
The inverse of the golden ratio (~1/1.618) is ~0.62, which is close to two thirds (0.67).
2025-04-17 20:03:21
In the 100 Billion Humans Series, I defend that we can and should try to put 100B humans on Earth. Here are all the updates relevant to those articles, including solar energy, nuclear, geoengineering, reforestation, vertical farming, oceans, and more. My favorite is 8: How to grow crops in the dark.
One of the arguments of why we should get to 100B humans is because the more humans we are, the richer we are. The richer we are, the happier we are. Here’s clear backup for that second claim: People in richer countries do report much higher life satisfaction.
It does help to live in a Latin American or Nordic country, but wealth is unmistakably one of the strongest factors.
So if more people makes us richer, and being richer makes us happier, let’s make babies, get rich, and spread happiness!
Ed Conway wanted to write a series about all the materials we’ve exhausted:
“… in trying to hunt around for minerals we have run out of, I came to an unexpected conclusion. So far, we haven’t really, meaningfully run out of, well, pretty much anything. …
He found malachite, which is oxidized copper for decoration, but we can manufacture something equivalent today. Ed ended up canceling that series.
Jason Crawford also looked for materials we’ve exhausted. His conclusion? The same. We haven’t run out of much. When we have, we’ve always found an alternative.
We have exhausted some things that are not elements though: We’ve driven some animals to extinction, some woods are now too rare to be exploited, there’s limited land left to convert to agriculture. But these are not elements, which are irreplaceable. The materials are replaceable, and we have other ways to produce food without using more land. And the more time passes, the better we are at managing our scarce resources.
In 1980, the biologist Paul Ehrlich agreed to a bet with the economist Julian Simon on how the prices of five materials would change over the next decade. Ehrlich thought all materials would go up in price, Simon thought the opposite.
Simon won on all five counts.
This is the long-term price of these materials:
As you can see, adjusted for inflation, these elements don’t tend to become more expensive. They are either stable or go slightly down. Why?
The more we grow, the more we demand resources, and the more we produce them. When they become scarce, there’s so much money to be made finding more, that people simply do it.
In the 100 Billion Humans Series, I was surprised to see the poor quality of the modeling of degrowthers: Every time fearmongers tell us that something really bad is going to happen if we continue this way, I look at their calculations, and there’s some glaring error that would get an entry-level consultant shipped off to Siberia. Apparently, this guy had a similar experience with Limits to Growth, probably the most famous work on the topic.
2025-04-15 20:03:00
As I research the country, these are the most interesting and surprising facts I’ve gathered—and some beautiful images along the way.
This is the biggest argument in favor of Capitalism vs Communism, but most people misinterpret this picture:
Why do they misinterpret it?
Here we can compare population density with night lights:
See how the north has very few lights, but actually a decent-sized population? What’s shocking is that the population in the North vs South has actually been quite stable over history!
Here is that data displayed as a ratio:
If you think about it, it makes sense that the population ratio of each wouldn’t dramatically change over history: Agriculture is a reasonably easy thing to do, where technology improves yields (and hence, more food allows the population to grow), and this technology is somewhat easy to get. Furthermore, crop yields improve slowly. North Korean yields are not much lower than South Korea’s:
So going back to our night lights vs population density map, they are not an indictment of agricultural productivity which translates into population density. No, they simply prove that South Korea has much more light per capita than North Korea. North Korea can’t afford as much lighting. Biggest endorsement of Capitalism ever!
In fact, we can learn a ton more about South Korea by looking at the night lights:
First, Seoul is a monster. It only occupies 12% of SK’s territory, but with 26 million people, its metropolitan area is the 4th largest in the world and accounts for 50% of the country’s total population! One South Korean in two lives in Seoul.
This concentration is even more obvious on this map:
Meanwhile, the metropolitan population of Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, is just over 3M. Tiny.
You can see the border between the Koreas on the night map!
The DMZ has a 2 km buffer on each side of the border, where people can’t go.
The border doesn’t have a wall, because nobody is even supposed to get that far. The walls are on the North and South Korean sides.
Another weird thing: Do you notice all the lights in the sea?
We can see something similar off the coast of the Falkland Islands:
What are these?
Ships!
More specifically, fishing ships, especially for squid.
Why the lights? They attract animals.
And why there and not somewhere else?
Because these are water upwells! Nutrients fall to the sea bed. Upwells bring them to the surface, which generates phytoplankton and zooplankton, so fish and shellfish concentrate there to eat them. This is also why the coast of Peru is so rich in fish:
Here’s a map of the topography of Korea’s seas (“bathymetry”):
Most of the ships concentrate at the edge of lower and higher seabed.
You can also notice that the light pattern is completely unlike those of other regions like China, the US, or Europe:
There, light is quite distributed throughout in a fractal way: lots of small towns, a few cities interspersed, and then even fewer metropolises even more spread out.
South Korea is not at all distributed like that. It has several very illuminated areas, with lines of light communicating them. Why?
The pics I took of China, Europe, and the US are from their plains. Without geographic constraints, this is what the human population distribution looks like.
But as we know, Korea is very mountainous. You can see similarities with other mountainous areas like the Alps:
People live wherever there’s a flat area to live! And the lines connecting them are valleys.
We can see that even better in population density vs topography maps. As we discussed in the past, eastern Korea is very mountainous.
If we overlay this topography map with population density, this happens:
If you zoom in, you’ll see that every nook and cranny of somewhat flat land is populated, including the narrow valleys that connect bigger plains!
This reminds me of Italy:
This is why South Korean land is used the way it is:
Mountains are very hard to cultivate, which means there is lots of forest. Agricultural land is mostly concentrated in the western coastal areas—so much so that no grassland remains. And just as agriculture took over grasslands and plain forests, urbanization is taking over agricultural land.
Why?
One of the most common political divides is that cities tend to be much more progressive and rural areas more conservative, as we explained in this article. It makes sense: In rural areas, population density is much lower, so people resolve their conflicts amongst themselves, and they see little impact from governmental actions. And since there’s not a lot of people movement or economic activity, new problems won’t quickly emerge, so tradition is a good proxy for the set of rules you should follow. People vote for smaller governments and more conservative parties. Conversely, in cities people cross paths with strangers all the time, so the state often needs to intervene in social conflicts, and its footprint is therefore everywhere, and people vote for more progressive parties that want a bigger administration.
Since the east of Korea is much more mountainous, it’s much less densely populated, and hence leans more conservative.
Japan is formed by the boundary between the Pacific, Philippine, and Euriasian plates.
This elevated the eastern part against the seabed.
Meanwhile, the Yellow Sea to the west is much shallower so the massive amount of rain that falls on the region from the Pacific influence carries sediments downhill, gaining land on the Yellow Sea through sediment accumulation over tens of millions of years, creating the North China Plain, the Manchurian Plain, and the western plains of Korea.
You can see this sedimentation here at the mouth of the Yellow River:
And more broadly throughout the Yellow Sea:
And this is why the west has more plains and population:
As we saw the other day:
Russia and North Korea have a common border, which means China doesn’t get access to the Sea of Japan. This is a remnant of the USSR invasion of Japan-controlled China and Korea in 1945. The USSR split that corridor between itself and North Korea.
The Korean script (Hangul) is unique in many ways.
First, it’s one of very few scripts with a known origin & creator! And that creator was none less than a king! If you think about it, that makes sense. There are plenty of people who create new scripts, but nobody uses them, because it’s so damn hard to learn a new alphabet, so they don’t convince anybody to learn it. You require coercion for people to learn a new one. So you need a unique situation for a country to adopt a new script. You need:
A ruler who is intelligent enough to see the need for a new script and interested enough in the topic to push for it
They must be strong enough to impose their will on the population
They must stay in power for long enough to make it happen
This lucky bundle of circumstances took place in Korea, and that’s why they have a great script. Why?
Like for most of its cultural influences, Koreans used Chinese script to write. But the writing is disconnected from the speech, so a person who knew how to speak Korean could not write it easily. As a result, only elites wrote in Korea. Sejong the Great, the 4th Joseon king, decided to change this in 1443: Make Korean readable by all, including commoners.
“A smart man can learn it before lunch, and a fool can learn it in ten days.” – King Sejong
If you doubt that this was indeed the goal of the script, it was first published in a document called the Hunminjeongeum: The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People:
[Since] the spoken language of this country is different from that of China, it does not flow well with [Chinese] characters. Therefore, even if the ignorant want to communicate, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have [had] 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that [they] be convenient for daily use.—Hunminjeongeum Haerye
How did he achieve that? By creating skeuomorphic letters! The shape of the letters reflects the shape of the mouth when making their corresponding sound:
That way, by looking at a letter, you can guess the sound.
The script would then combine the letters of syllables, reminiscent of Chinese script. Here’s the same sentence translated by Google Translate into Korean and Chinese:
Who stood to lose? The elites, of course. So they pushed back against the adoption of the new script, but failed. The script was adopted by people.
Only when the king stood to lose did the script get banned. This happened in 1504, when the king (Yeonsangun) was criticized in writing—using the more accessible Hangul, of course. In the late 1800s, the government pushed for its adoption by teaching it in schools. During the Japanese occupation between 1910 and 1945, its use was first limited and then banned, but it was revived in North and South Korea after liberation.
The Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, is the tallest building in all the country, but it’s empty! It was never finished.
It’s a hollow pyramid. Surrounded by eerie, pastel-colored residential buildings:
Nearly all the urban photos you can find on the Internet are devoid of traffic, human or automobile. No advertisements, billboards, coffee shops. Everything is deserted, massive concrete. Eerie.
The Science and Technology Complex has the shape of an atom from above.
Here’s a side pic:
This is the zoo:
Of course, a lot of the architecture is dedicated to the triumph of Communism
And the triumph of Korea’s leaders:
Here from the back:
Out of the 13 heads of state since WW2, 12 have experienced a tumultuous end:
And the Spaniards, Italians, Israelis, and even the French.1
It’s even more impressive given that, after WW2, it was as poor as countries like India, China, and Afghanistan, and even poorer than countries like Ghana!
At 0.86 children per woman, it’s the lowest in the world.2
There was a small uptick in 2024, but it’s unclear if this trend will continue. It depends on the underlying reason for this low fertility. I’ll write a full article on it, but in the meantime, here’s one clue:
Across the developed world, women have moved to the left. But in South Korea, we also find that men have moved to the right, resulting in perhaps the biggest ideological gap in the developed world.
We’ll explore much more of that in the upcoming article on South Korea’s gender relations and fertility rate!
On a PPP basis (purchasing power parity)
Excluding Hong Kong
2025-04-10 20:02:45
The force that bisected Korea in 1945 is not recent: It has been pulling it apart for thousands of years. In fact, you can understand all of Korea’s history through this one force, evident in this map:
From this map, you can conclude:
Korea is an appendix at the end of Asia
It’s immediately next to China—across the Yellow Sea from China’s heartland, the North China Plain, and south of the Manchurian Plain.
Only the very narrow Korean Strait separates it from Japan.
Korea is long from north to south and mountainous, with a craggy mountain range to the east and some coastal plains to the west.
What are the direct consequences of that?
Whoever controls East Asia will be well positioned to control the Korean Peninsula—or at least try to.
But it won’t be easy: Korea is long and mountainous, two factors that make it hard to control.
The obvious candidate to attempt to control Korea is China, since it’s very populous and its heartland is so close.
Japan is the other obvious candidate, on the opposite side. But the fact that it’s a smaller country and across a sea makes it much harder for Japan to control Korea.
Since Korea is oriented north-south, so long, and so mountainous, its internal divisions will tend to be north-south, since it’s hard to unify the entire region.
Normally, plains are fertile and have more population that develops agricultural societies, while mountains are more easily defensible and breed roaming pastoral people who tend to descend on the plains people. Therefore, the east and west of Korea will tend to be unstable until one side prevails. Eventually, the capitals of these states will end up in the west, where most of the people and wealth live, to control them better.
The coast is extremely rugged, which is usually great for ports, with lots of protected inlets and deep water access from the coast. Given that, and the proximity to Japan and China, the south and west of Korea would develop trade.
Or in a schematic way:
This is what happened in 1945:
The Eurasian power du jour was the USSR
The seaborne power du jour was the US
They fought for influence in Korea and split it.
Once you look through this lens, it becomes easy to read Korea’s history: It will start as a series of small kingdoms separated by mountains along the length of the peninsula, and the more technology progresses, the more the kingdoms will tend to unite, just as the foreign pressures from north and south increase. Let’s see it.
If you learn three words, you can follow most of Korea’s history.
The first is the particle Go, which is added at the beginning of a word and means “ancient” or ”high”. It was applied after the fact: Imagine that France disappeared and a similar country reappeared 300 years later. It would call itself “France” again to hark back to the legitimacy of the previous kingdom, and would call the old version “Ancient France”, “High France”, or in Korean “Gofrance”.
The second word is Goryeo, which is basically Korea (same sound), spelled differently. We use Korea in Western languages because Westerners discovered the country in medieval times, when it was a kingdom called Goryeo that lasted between ~950 and ~1400,1 ruled by a single family, the Wang Dynasty. Goryeo probably comes from the particle we already know, Go (high, ancient) plus Guri/Guru/Gauri (“castle”, “walled city”, “place”, or “center”), meaning “the high place”.
But that name of Goryeo already existed before! The medieval kingdom took its name from a previous kingdom that existed around the times of the Roman Empire, so that one was renamed with an additional Go particle, and is now called Goguryeo (“ancient high place”).
The third word is Joseon: The Yi dynasty took over Goryeo’s Wang dynasty around 1400, and ruled under that name for ~500 years until ~1900. “Joseon” means “Fresh Dawn” or “New Dynasty”.
Of course, Joseon was also the name of an ancient kingdom, which the Wang dynasty fished back from history to differentiate themselves from Goryeo. The only kingdom that was even more ancient than Goguryeo was Joseon, so they reused that name and rebaptized the old one Gojoseon (“ancient Joseon”, or “ancient new dynasty”).
Below is a broad, stylized timeline of Korea’s history. I tried to portray the northern kingdoms at the top and the southern kingdoms at the bottom.
You can notice a few things:
Korea was split at the beginning of its history—mostly around the north-south axis—until it unified around the year 1000 AD.
It remained broadly unified until the aftermath of WW2, when it split between North and South Korea, again around the north-south axis, and in a way reminiscent of the splits centuries earlier.
It suffered from frequent invasions from the north (red), usually from China (Han, Tang, and Qing dynasties) but also from the Mongols in the 1200s, and more recently, by the Soviet Union in 1945 and Communist China in 1950.
It was subject to naval invasions as Japan became more powerful in the late 1500s, and again in the late 1800s, until it became a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945. After that, the US became the naval power bolstering the south.
As noted, the names of the two longest periods of unity, Goryeo (900s to ~1400) and Joseon (~1400 to the late 1800s) hark back to their ancient (“Go”) versions of Gojoseon and Goguryeo.
Here’s a very quick video to give you a sense of these things:
Let’s look more closely at each of these periods.
The oldest proto-state in Korea, Gojoseon, emerged between 2000 BC and 1000 BC in the north—quite close to present-day North Korea—and lasted until ~100 BC.
It’s not a surprise that the northern kingdom emerged in that part of the peninsula around that time: This is when Chinese civilization arose, and it slowly bled into Korea over the following centuries. It’s also why the Jin state, to the south, emerged much later, around 400-200 BC, and was a loose confederation of states rather than a strong centralized state: Chinese civilization took a long time to travel outward from its North China Plain heartland.
When you have a superpower growing in your neighborhood, sooner or later it will invade you. It’s only a matter of it growing strong enough and getting organized, which the Han did, so in 108 BC, they invaded, destroyed Gojoseon, and put Four Commanderies in place to control the region.
Many people escaped from Han control and joined or helped form new kingdoms.
Over time, these small kingdoms coalesced.
The natural heir of Gojoseon was Goguryeo, adding a big chunk of the Manchurian Plain to its north. With so much plain to cultivate, Goguryeo became by far the strongest power, while the south split along the coasts.
Alas, this made Goguryeo an enemy of China, and the two went to war many times. But China was also a potential enemy to Baekje due to its proximity, while the more distant Silla was less of a threat. Silla was therefore able to grow unimpeded.
Then Silla allied with China’s Tang dynasty to eliminate first Baekje, then Goguryeo. They split Goguryeo, but Silla eventually defeated the Chinese Tang and unified a big chunk of the Korean peninsula for the first time in its history. The remnants of Goguryeo became the kingdom of Balhae, which extended farther to the northeast.
Silla enjoyed peace for 200 years, and attempted to integrate refugees from Baekje and Goguryeo, in the first attempt at creation of a national identity. But it failed, and eventually the old kingdoms split again.
This time, Goguryeo prevailed over Silla and Baekje, absorbed refugees from Balhae, and was first to fully unify the entire Korean peninsula, becoming Goryeo—the name from which Korea comes from.
In Goryeo’s ~500 years, nearly all threats to its existence came from the north. First from the Khitan and Jurchen tribes (Manchus), and later from the Mongols, who invaded Korea nine times, repeatedly destroying the kingdom until they subdued it in the mid 1200s, making it a vassal state of Mongol-controlled China for nearly a century. Notice how the borders of Goryeo are very close to those of present-day North+South Korea!
Throughout Goryeo’s history, it remained a tributary to the Chinese rulers. The only difference was the extent of the tributes: light under the Song Dynasty (960-1279), heavy under the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty (1270-1356).
Soon after Mongol control weakened and Goryeo regained independence, its ruling family was toppled by the Joseon, who went on to reign for ~500 years.
The Joseon introduced many of the hallmarks of Korean society today. They brought the capital to Seoul, implemented civil service exams, scientifically created a new alphabet to replace the Chinese one, and shifted the country’s religion from Buddhism to Confucianism—which made the country more patriarchal, with stronger gender norms. To maintain the Confucian purity, it became increasingly hermetic with respect to external influences, leading to its reputation as the Hermit Kingdom.
About one century into the Joseon period, a new threat emerged, this time from the south: Japan! Japan had recently unified—a common milestone across countries at that time. This is no coincidence: Technology and institutions2 were sophisticated enough to allow for big swaths of land to be unified. And since governments that unify countries tend to be militaristic, once they’re done, they’re usually like, “What else can we conquer?” Unfortunately for Korea, the only thing close to Japan is Korea.
During the Imjin Wars, in the late 1500s, Japan invaded nearly all of Korea. But the Japanese were quickly expelled, thanks to the support of local guerrillas and China’s Ming dynasty—who didn’t want to lose their tributary state!
Fun fact: In the Battle of Myeongnyang, 13 Korean ships faced over 100 Japanese ships and won, not losing a single ship, while sinking or crippling over 30 Japanese ones! The 2014 movie depicting it was the highest-grossing movie of all time in Korea.
Joseon, too, was a tributary state to China: Sending light tributes to the Ming Dynasty (until 1644), and heavier tributes to the Manchu Qing Dynasty. This is why the Ming sent support against the Japanese in the late 1500s.
In the mid-1800s, Western powers, which had been developing at breakneck speed thanks to their Industrial Revolution, paid a visit to East Asia. They forced China, Korea, and Japan to open up to Western influence. Of those, only Japan industrialized quickly, and in a matter of decades starting in the 1900s, it used this newfound power to break the hold of China over Korea, take over Taiwan, fend off Russia, invade Korea, invade China, and then during WW2, take over half of Asia-Pacific.
This is not a happy period of Korean history.3 Tens of thousands of cultural artifacts were taken to Japan, hundreds of historic buildings were demolished, the Korean language was banned, Koreans suffered mass murders…
Japan’s primary objective was to use Korea for its resources. First, rice—which accounted for as much as 10% of Japan’s food consumption. Japan modernized Korea’s farming methods and expanded its output, but still, the share it took from farmers reduced the overall rice consumption in Korea. Many Korean farmers had to sell their land or leave.4
Japan also took over the timber, coal, and iron industries.
The only silver lining I can see is that Japan saw Korea as an important source of goods to fund an invasion of China, so it developed its agriculture, infrastructure and industries. It built railways, ports and roads.5
This boom in industry also created a population explosion.
And the Japanese brought public education, telephones, cars…
With industry came unions, at a time when the world was playing with the ideas of Socialism and Communism. So as Koreans resisted, they started splitting into nationalist and socialist camps—the same as was happening in China, which would later end up in a civil war and the success of Communism in Mainland China.
During WW2, the exploitation of Korean workers ramped up. Over 5 million Koreans were mobilized to support the Japanese war effort. About 450,000 Korean male laborers were involuntarily sent to Japan—some of their descendants still reside there, some ended up trapped in the Soviet Union.
Japan used hundreds of thousands of women—many from Korea—as comfort women: sex slaves.
These women were raped by up to 40 men per day, and their stories are horrendous.6 Japan also had a covert biological and chemical warfare research division during WW2, named Unit 731,7 which conducted brutal experiments on prisoners, including Koreans.
And this is where we reach the story of the 1945 partition, which I shared here.
Because of its geography, Korea has always been a land that wants to unite: A small, elongated peninsula that naturally belongs together. It’s why today nearly all Koreans are ethnically Korean.
The ancient kingdoms of Gojoseon, Goguryeo, and Silla attempted this unification, but it was Goryeo who succeeded, uniting the peninsula for one thousand years. But the forces surrounding it have always been strong, and have torn it apart. It happened with the Chinese, Mongols, Japanese, Soviets, and the US and the ideas of Capitalist Democracy vs Communist Authoritarianism.
In many ways, I find the South Korean flag extremely fitting for the country.
Officially, the flag has a white background to represent peace and purity, the circle in the flag's center is the Yin and Yang and symbolizes harmony, with the blue half representing negative energy and the red the positive. The four trigrams (the symbols with three rows each) represent the seasons, the cardinal points, family relationships, elements, values…
But I find its unintended symbolism even more interesting. Korea didn’t have a flag until it started negotiating with Japan and the US in the late 1800s. The flag is a direct result of foreign influences.
More importantly, at its heart, the circle (taegeuk) is one unit, like Korea. But it’s split in half, like Korea. The red half at the top and a blue half at the bottom symbolize the two huge influences that Korea has suffered through its history:
The Continental Asians to the north: the Chinese, Mongols, Soviets, and its latest embodiment, the ideology of Communism.
The Seaborne influences to the south: first Japan, and now the US.
Korea is now split, broadly through the middle, following the same line and colors as those of the taegeuk, and representing the unity of Korea and the two forces that pull it apart.
Tellingly, Goryeo also used the names Samhan and Haedong, meaning "East of the Sea". Which sea? The Yellow Sea. Which means Korea would have a name in reference to China (which is west of that same sea), reinforcing the idea of China being a significant reference point in Korean culture and history.
They’re the same thing in my mind: ideas.
Which means I’m sure to offend somebody here, so please accept my apologies beforehand; there’s no desire to hurt anyone.
When I don’t cite a source, the data will come from Korean History in Maps.
Although workers were subjected to extremely poor conditions, and a lot of this infrastructure was destroyed during the 1950–1953 Korean War.
You can read a few here. They are truly horrible. Comfort women were often recruited from rural villages with the promise of factory employment, or jobs as nurses or secretaries. There is evidence that the Japanese government intentionally destroyed official records regarding comfort women. Comfort women stations were created after Japan’s invasion of China and the mass rape and killings that the Japanese soldiers performed on the Chinese. Why these comfort women? Winning soldiers tend to rape their way into the civilian population. Japanese soldiers did that in Nanjing, China, with very bad results. Japanese authorities decided to create these Comfort Women stations to prevent a worsening of anti-Japanese sentiment, reduce venereal diseases among Japanese troops, prevent leakage of military secrets by civilians who were in contact with Japanese officers, and minimize medical expenses for treating venereal diseases that the soldiers acquired from frequent and widespread rape (which hindered Japan's military capacity). Comfort women stations were so prevalent that the Imperial Army offered accountancy classes on how to manage comfort stations, which included how to determine the actuarial "durability or perishability of the women procured”.
This is also quite horrible.
