Wednesday, January 26, 2011

200 years of progress in a few minutes

A very cool video from BBC 4 on what has happened to the relationship between life expectancy and income over the past 200 years.

One can, of course quibble about the different scales on the horizontal and vertical axis, and with the failure to note the lagging progress of sub-Saharan Africa amidst all the optimism at the end.

And then life expectancy is itself a very odd thing, based as it is on strong synthetic cohort assumptions.

But worth watching in any case, just for the graphical presentation.

Hat tip: Ken Troske

1 comment:

Ben Connor Barrie said...

That's a cool video. It looks like it was made with Gampinder , or a similar application. I'm GSI-ing Global Change II right now and we often use Gampinder as an educational tool. It's lots of fun to play around with.