Check out this neat new tool from Google. Looks like a new way to look at global statistics and trends – I’m going through the manual right now.
wow, there goes my night…
Wow, is that ever interesting. The default chart is life expectancy (vertical) versus income per person (horizontal). Watching India and China march rightwards as the years go by is impressive. And what’s up with South Africa? It gets richer and life expectancy decreases? Its blue dot goes for a nosedive rightwards after 1992.
South Africa hardly budges as far as income per capita – it hovers around the $10,000 mark for the entire time (and even dips below it for a while).
Keep an eye out for little Rwanda on the life expectancy measure – the way it drops out for a few years there is frightening.
Pity it hasn’t included Iraq. That would have been interesting.
But in 1992 the average life expectancy is 63 and by 2004 it’s 45! Are we seeing the effects of AIDS? A rich/poor split? Immigration? What?
Interesting. According to the charts, the worst CO2 emissions per capita come from the Virgin Islands and in the Middle East, both of which are considerably worse than the rest of the world.
I checked the life expectancy charts, too, and (naturally, I guess) they seem to be lowest in Africa.