200 Years of Economic Development in 4 minutes

Hans Rosling Graphically illustrates 200 years of Economic Development in 4 Minutes

Note by James R. Martin

The video below is an interesting presentation by Hans Rosling illustrating the economic development of 200 countries over the last 200 years. Life expectancy is placed on the vertical axis and income per person is represented on the horizontal axis. Life expectancy ranges from 25 years to 75 years while income per person ranges from $400 to $40,000. According to Rosling, the series of graphics illustrated represents 120,000 numbers plotted to show the changes in life expectancy and income per person from 1810 to 2010.

Each country is presented as a circle or bubble, and the size indicates the relative size of the country's population. The colors of the bubbles indicate the country's location. Blue is Africa, Red is Asia, Orange (he calls it brown) is Europe, Yellow is the Americas, and Green is the Mid-east. The 2010 graphic (see below) shows what Rosling refers to as a converging world where all countries are moving up from the condition of poor and sick toward a condition of rich and healthy. A couple of other screen captures show the changes since 1948.

Perhaps this illustration represents an argument for trickle down economics, but see my note on the Universal law of wealth.

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Some useful links:

For an explanation of the software used in the video see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trendalyzer

For more on this software and Rosling's work see http://www.gapminder.org/

For more Rosling Gapminder videos see http://www.gapminder.org/videos/

To see the entire 200 years develop see the Gapminder World Tool

To get Gapminder Desktop go to http://www.gapminder.org/desktop/