About the money stuff: this is all extremely misleading chiefly because a lot of people grow and/or catch their own food and build their own houses on community owned land with no debt, thus have minimal expenses and no interest in having or raising this number. The global capitalist system seeks to change this, often by stealing their land at gunpoint or children with the lure of materialism, but while increasing material 'wealth' (ie. shiny trinkets and nominally convenient tech) ultimately results in bad things happening to health (sometimes; this can go both ways), community, security, and the environment.
In map #35, Open defecation in India, look at the difference between the hard-line Hindu state of Tamil Nadu (southeast) versus the long-time communist state of Kerala (southwest coast). Incidentally, you see open defecation in southeast Asia and China as well.
In map #37, in 13 years I've never seen anyone appearing to be obviously malnourished and/or starving in China (and my time tends towards mountainous/poor areas), so I'm not sure where they get their statistics from. The throwaway remark about them 'getting better at feeding their people' is frankly bullshit: China is a leader in agricultural science, they are very good at extracting vast productivity from small areas of land and producing protein-rich foods such as tofu in harsh climates.
Similarly, map #38 is complete bullshit. China is absolutely covered in extremely high quality infrastructure such as highways.
You couldn't talk this way among people I know, especially the more intelligent and opinionated among them. They would either roll their eyes and look for an exit like they would when confronted by a door knocking cult member or get sucked in inevitably resulting in cross "don't encourage them" looks from their girlfriend.
Where do people find enough other people to talk to where they can even develop this way of speaking. With cults you need to be around only other members of the cult to sound like this.
I think I'm starting to buy into this internet feedback bubble. I think it might be where new cults get made.
What a bizarre notion. The global capitalist system has goals? It owns guns, and steals land and children?
Let's ignore this fuzzy notion for now and address what you seem to be claiming.
Yes, there is a global capitalist system, and yes, guns are sometimes used to steal land, but no, it is not a defining characteristic of capitalism to steal land at gunpoint. You just weaken your case by this overreach. Reasonable people tune out when you start making shit up like this.
Sure, capitalism, as a philosophy doesn't have goal. Yet, the clash between a capitalistic society where land-ownership exist and societies where land is shared does and has ended up in conflict, with the capitalistic ones taking away the lands from the native. At gun-point. It happened in Canada, USA, the whole of Americas. It happened in Australia. Rolling eyes and acting smug does not further the conversation. It does lead credence to the meme that people ignore their own history.
However with such a wealth of information I am sure as I go through the rest I will find something else to take up my day
okay, #35 creeps me out. Having read a story on how difficult it is to get people to use toilets even after the government went on a building spree I can understand how the map can look so extreme
As to #35, for most of the last couple of thousand years having religious prohibitions about not crapping in your house was actually a good thing. It's only with the invention of indoor plumbing that it's suddenly a disadvantage.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/06/open-defecation-solve...
The child growth stunting effects aren't caused by lack of nice plumbing as such - even moving from open defecation to covered pit toilets would solve most of the problem.
And now, the situation is reversed. While Colonialism is an oft repeated cause whereby everything of native ingenuity was systematically destroyed, what is depressing is that even 65 years after Independence, Poverty & Public Health are still issues that affect India.
> how difficult it is to get people to use toilets
The mind boggles
[0] - http://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/666632/mck...
And besides does the point make any sense at all? The world's economic center of gravity is currently somewhere in northern Russia.
The movement on the hand tells a clear story of forming circle where the world's economic activity returns to Asia from a short trip to Europe and USA.
The movement is maybe less dependent on the projection.
I can't speak for other countries, but in France the official metric is heavily manipulated and does not make sense anymore. Basically, if you are unemployed long enough (~2 year), you do not get money from the unemployment insurance, and thereby are no longer unemployed.
Beside that, extremely cool collection of maps.
[1] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....
Not so with economics; I'm very skeptical of a "center of economic activity" constructed as shown in figure 2. What questions does it answer well that a proper geographic distribution does not? (It certainly doesn't imply that all economic transactions go through that "center".) I think it misleads more than it helps. (And I'm not even going into the 3D -> 2D problems.)
The 2D projection only shows "non-radial" movements (e.g. shifts not pointed towards the earth's core). For example, if the center of gravity moves directly to the other side of the planet, the 2D projection won't change until the 3D point passes through the core, at which point the projection would jump wildly to the other side of the planet.
This is probably quite similar to what has really happened. I'd expect that the westward shift from AD 1 to 1950 had much to do with the growth in the Americas. Afterwards, I'd expect growth in India, China, and Japan moved the center eastward.
Here is a nice analysis that does the same process in a more intuitive way. It calculates the centre of economic gravity in 2D map coordinates. This gives results that are easier to understand, because everyone's used to looking at 2D maps.
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/djv/world_economic_center...
Previous discussion:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mys...
Most of the maps are fun, quirky and/or entertaining. A few of them illustrate a single, isolated point well. But explain more than the most trivial points (China is kind of a big deal!) they most certainly don't.
Vox increasingly looks like intellectually pretentious Buzzfeed.
A little Googling shows its fisherman attracting the squid to the surface with massive lights. Who knew?
Every visualization have some kind of bias in what data is used. How it is categorized. Mapped to colors. Projected on screen. Mapped on to a world map which itself is biased. Etc. etc. But compared to raw numbers or text the quantity of information that can be chucked into a picture is magnitudes greater. And it is immediately understandable and invites to further exploration in way no other media does.
I really wish we had more of this.
And would counting Americas cardless Mexicans affect the per capita count too?
I love Map 10 though, principal exports, very interesting.
