Wednesday, June 9, 2010

www.Gapminder.org

There's a relatively interesting website, Gapminder.org, for the nerdy among us. The website's creators have found a way to compile data from various organizations and present it in relatively easy to use formats. The technology now seems to be owned by Google.

You can browse through the graphs but the most interesting is the "Wealth & Health of Nations." I am not convinced that the data is entirely accurate, especially prior to 1900 in developed countries and the last 40-50 years in developing nations, but the general trends should be a close approximation of the truth. As an example, if you track the United States from 1800 to 1880 the life expectancy remains constant at 40. This doesn't seem realistic since life expectancy measures expected life span if current mortality rates remain constant. In that 80 year span there were multiple wars, outbreaks of disease, and so on. The US did have an extremely high population growth rate at the time, so it is possible that it remained relatively constant over that period. For those of you who are history buffs, isolate the Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain, the effect of war on life expectancy is shocking.

Another graph that is interesting to look at is the GDP vs. Cereal Production per Hectare. A hectare is roughly 2.5 acres and cereals are the building blocks of most people's diets. Generally speaking productivity (in this case yield per hectare) rises with GDP, save for countries that have climate issues, i.e. Australia. The data for this graph isn't perfect since different products have different yields per hectare. I am postulating here that this is why Egypt has such a high yield, but it could also be related to the validity of data from countries with uncertain political systems.

Note: I use wikipedia for source information because it represents a pooling of knowledge that for history, science, finance, or other technical subjects is generally accurate. I only post links if the wikipedia article is accurate at first glance and consistent with other sources.

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