I sent this link to my students; wish I'd seen this early enough to use it in my post-colonial class. Smart, entertaining, enlightening 4-minute video. Might make your morning better too.
Do you know about the tool he’s using to show the data?
It’s called Gapminder, and Google bought it a couple years ago.
You (and your students) can use it for free online. You pick what two variables to plot against each other (out of a bunch of different options), and what countries to show, and you can drag the year slider back and forth to see how things change over time.
The video is super cool because it provides explanation and discussion to go with the data (and it’s nicely put together, too). But I wish they had linked to the tool so viewers would know they could play with the data visualization themselves.
…I also think it’s interesting that he doesn’t talk much about Africa remaining way over in the “poor and sick” part of the graph. Life expectancy has clearly improved significantly there (and income has improved a fair bit, given that the income axis is logarithmic), but I think his overall message of “things are getting better for everyone” kind of obscures the disturbing lack of things getting nearly as much better in Africa than elsewhere. I know he didn’t have much time, and I was really pleased that he covered the nuance of country averages; I’m not complaining about the video overall. But I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Africa.
This is a great video; thanks for posting it.
Do you know about the tool he’s using to show the data?
It’s called Gapminder, and Google bought it a couple years ago.
You (and your students) can use it for free online. You pick what two variables to plot against each other (out of a bunch of different options), and what countries to show, and you can drag the year slider back and forth to see how things change over time.
The video is super cool because it provides explanation and discussion to go with the data (and it’s nicely put together, too). But I wish they had linked to the tool so viewers would know they could play with the data visualization themselves.
…I also think it’s interesting that he doesn’t talk much about Africa remaining way over in the “poor and sick” part of the graph. Life expectancy has clearly improved significantly there (and income has improved a fair bit, given that the income axis is logarithmic), but I think his overall message of “things are getting better for everyone” kind of obscures the disturbing lack of things getting nearly as much better in Africa than elsewhere. I know he didn’t have much time, and I was really pleased that he covered the nuance of country averages; I’m not complaining about the video overall. But I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Africa.