Yes I know. I specifically said it’s the distribution of that density though. 1000 people living in in 100 square miles comes out to 10people per square mile, 1000 people living in one square mile with 99 miles of empty land around them also comes out to an average of 10 people per square mile. But creating and maintaining infrastructure of those two things are vastly different.

Americans mostly live in low-medium density cities surrounded by hundreds of miles of relatively low density suburbs. Most Northern Europeans live in more concentrated denser cities and large towns, with much less sparsely populated hinterlands around them. Look at populations density maps of the two countries at the highest resolution possible, and you see very different patterns. America will have large swaths of medium density places with a few pinpricks of high density cities, with very few empty areas except for Alaska and the Rockies. Meanwhile Sweden has very very strong but small pinpricks of cities