Hans Rosling, a guru of data animation, is at it again. Here is a very cool video showing 200 years of mortality/wealth progress in just four minutes:
(HT: Peter Siegelman)
Visualizing Mortality History
TAGS: data analysis, wealth
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Interesting, but the wealth gap and health gap both seem to have grown in absolute terms. I tend to be an optimist, but I think he overplays it a bit.
The Gapminder site is a wonderful venture! It’s part of a recent wave of improved data sources. The World Bank have impressive interactive graphs with lots of data too, and the OECD are using the same motion charts as Gapminder. Interesting times!
Masterpiece of infographics.
Curious – it didn’t divide countries up by economic system, but it looks like the big socialist countries went high on health before going high on income, whereas the more capitalist countries travel more closely to the diagonal. Did anyone else see that, or am I making it up?
I don’t like that the x-axis is exponential. I think and hope it was done that way for convenience/spacing reasons, but I think it distorts the income differences (if you have 3 points, with one in the exact middle of the other two, that middle point is actually more similar to the point on the left than the point on the right, despite being illustrated as equal distance to both).
@8—Brian:
In 1939 the Nazis invaded Western Poland and soon the Russians invaded Eastern Poland. The killing (and Red Army conscription) was enormous. The Jews were 1/3 or so of the population and huge numbers died, either in fighting or concentration camps. This was a blood-bath.
So that’s my guess.
I suspect Poland was the European country that fell so rapidly in 1941.
I wish, since he’d pointed out the effects of WWI & the flu epidemic, he’d pointed out the effects of the Cultural Revolution on China as well. That was a pretty big bounce on the graph, and I’m sure plenty of people watching wondered what that was!
Great infographic and presentation, until he mentioned “converging world.” That’s certainly true of human mortality rates, but not of wealth, which shows an immense divergence along the X-axis over the past 200 years.