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montanadave
03-29-11, 14:31
Some of you may have seen CNN's special edition of Fareed Zakaria's GPS show entitled Restoring the American Dream: Getting Back to #1 which aired several weeks ago. I thought it was well done and thought provoking, but what really caught my eye was the segment devoted to a historical graph charting national life expectancies and personal income over the past two centuries produced by Han Rosling, a Swedish professor of statistics. Here's a link to the segment:

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/hans-rosling-on-cnn-us-in-a-converging-world/

The gapminder.org website has a variety of other charts, graphs, and data, many of which are interactive and can be individually customized. If some of you are like me, the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" becomes even more relevant when doing statistical analysis and looking at long-term historical trends. Cool stuff-- at least to me.

HES
03-29-11, 21:25
Very cool and informative. I like his statements near the end that basically said "When a country gets fat, lazy, and slow, the others who are more hungry can not only catch up, but surpass the now former leader."

armakraut
03-30-11, 05:51
Well, he was sort of saying towards the end that with greater wealth, the desire to have children slows down and this slows down the growth also.

http://visualecon.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/avg-income-2006.jpg

Inflation adjusted average US income since 1913. Even though income was lower, life was far from miserable 100 years ago, but very different than what we are used to, families and communities were much more tight knit.

http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/images/2008/03/05/worldgdp1600_2003_2.gif

http://sabhlokcity.com/wp-content/uploads/gdp-per-capita-east-asia.jpg

For some unknown reason the charts start ticking upwards towards the tail end of the 1700's. It must be all that gold and land we stole from the Spaniards and Indians.