Visualization is right at the heart of my all work tool.
I teach Global health and I know having the data is not enough, I have to show it in ways people both enjoy and understand.
Now I'm going to try something I've never done before : animating the data in real space with the bit of technical assistance from the crew. So here we go!
First an axis for health : life expectancy from 25 years to 75 years;
and down here an axis for wealth ( income per person) : $400, $4000,$40000.
So down here is poor and sick and up here is rich and healthy.
Now I'm going to show you the world 200 years ago in 1810.
Here come all the countries:
Europe brown;
Asia red;
Middle-East green;
Africa South of the Sahara blue;
The America yellow.
And the size of the country , Bubble shows the size of the population and in 1810 it was pretty crowded down here wasn't it ?
All countries were sick and poor, life expectancy was below 40 in all countries and only the UK and the Netherlands were slightly better off, but not much.
And now, I start the world!
The industrial revolution makes countries in Europe and else where move away from the rest but the colonized countries in Asia and Africa, they are stacked down there and eventually the western countries get healthier and healthier and now we slow down to show the impact of the First World War and the Spanish Flue Epidemic. What a catastrophe!
And now I speed up through the 1920s and the 1930s and despite the great depression Western countries forge on towards greater and healthier wealth , Japan and some of others try to follow but most countries stay down here.
Now after the tragedies of the Second World War we stop a bit to look at the world in 1948:
1948 was a great year, the war was over, Sweden topped the medal table at the Winter Olympics and I was born but the differences between the countries of the world was wider than ever.
USA was in the front, Japan was catching up, Brazil was way behind , Iran was getting a little richer from oil but still had short life and the Asian giants, China,India,Pakistan,Bangladesh and Indonesia they were still poor and sick down here. But look what is about to happen! Here we go again!
In my lifetime former colonies gained indipendence and then finally they started to get healthier and healthier and healthier and in the 1970s those countries in Asia and Latin America started to catch up with the Western countries: they became the emerging economies, some in Africa follows, some Africans were stacked in civil war and others hit by HIV and now we can see the world today in the most up-todate statistics.
Most people today living in the middle, but there are huge differences at the same time between the best of countries ( Luxembourg) and the worst countries ( Congo) and they are also huge in the qualities within countries, these bubble shows countries overages but I can split them. Take China I can split it into provinces there goes Shangai, it has the same wealth and health as Italy today, and there is the poor inland province Guizhou, it is like Pakistan and if I split it further the rural parts are like Ghana in Africa.
And yet despite the enermous disparity, today we have seen 200 years of remarkable progress that huge historical gap between the west and the rest is now closing. We have become an entirely new converging world, and I see a clear trend to the future with aid,trade,green technology and peace, it's fully possible that everyone can make it to the healthy wealthy corner.
Well what you've seen in the last few minutes is the story of 200 countries shown 200 years and beyond, it involved plotting of 120000 numbers. Pretty neat eh ?