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Visualization is right at the heart of my own work too.
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I teach Global Health, and I know
having the data is not enough.
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I have to show it in ways people
both enjoy and understand.
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Now I'm going to try something I've never done
before, animating the data in real space,
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with a bit of technical assistance from the crew.
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So here we go, first an axis for health,
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life expectancy from 25 years to 75 years.
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And down here an axis for wealth,
income per person 400, 4,000, and $40,000.
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So down here is poor and sick,
and up here is rich and healthy.
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Now I'm going to show you
the world 200 years ago, in 1810.
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Here come all the countries Europe brown,
Asia red, Middle East green,
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Africa South of the Sahara blue,
and the Americas yellow.
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And the size of the country bubble
show the size of the population.
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And in 1810 it was pretty
crowded down there, wasn't it?
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All countries were sick and poor, life
expectancy were below 40 in all countries.
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And only the UK and the Netherlands
were slightly better off, but not much.
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And now, why start the world.
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The Industrial Revolution makes countries in
Europe and elsewhere move away from the rest.
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But the colonized countries in Asia and
Africa, they are stuck down there.
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And eventually the Western countries
get healthier and healthier.
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And now we slow down, to show
the impact of the First World War,
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and the Spanish flu epidemic, what a catastrophe.
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And now I speed up through the 1920s and the 1930s,
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and in spite of the Great Depression,
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western countries forge on towards
greater wealth and health.
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Japan and some others try to follow,
but most countries stay down here.
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Now, after the tragedies of the Second World War,
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we stop a bit to look at the world in 1948.
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1948 was a great year, the war was over,
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Sweden topped the medal table at
the Winter Olympics, and I was born.
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But the differences between the countries
of the world was wider than ever.
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United States was in the front, Japan
was catching up, Brazil was way behind,
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Iran was getting a little richer
from oil, but still had short lives.
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And the Asian giants, China,
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and
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Indonesia, they were still poor and sick down here.
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But look what is about to happen, here we go again.
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In my lifetime former colonies gained independence and
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then finally they started to get
healthier and healthier and healthier.
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And in the 1970s then countries in Asia and
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Latin America started to catch
up with the Western countries.
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They became the emerging economies,
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some in Africa follows, some Africans were
stuck in civil war, and others hit by HIV.
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And now, we can see the world today
in the most up-to-date statistics.
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Most people today live in the middle,
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but there's a huge difference at the same time between
the best off countries and the worst off countries.
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And there are huge inequalities within countries.
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These bubbles show country
averages, but I can split them.
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Take China, I can split it into provinces,
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there goes Shanghai.
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It has the same wealth and health as Italy today.
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And there is the poor inline province
Guizhou, it is like Pakistan,
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and if I split it further, the rural
parts are like Ghana in Africa.
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And yet despite the enormous disparities today,
we have seen 200 years of remarkable progress,
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that huge historical gap between
the west and the rest is now closing.
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We have become an entirely new converging world,
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and I see a clear trend into the future with
aid, trade, green technology, and peace.
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It's fully possible that everyone can
make it to the healthy wealthy corner.
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Well what you've just seen in the last few minutes
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is a story of 200 countries shown
over 200 years and beyond.
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It involved plotting 120,000 numbers, pretty neat uh?
