World Income Mapped by Location | Hacker News Reader

World Income Mapped by Location

ngm.nationalgeographic.com

18 pointsjamesbritt15 comments

I always find the common note on CO2 emissions, regarding the US per capita emissions as being higher even though China's overall is now higher, to be heavily context dropping.

The US economy is twice the size of China's, and the US manufacturing output is still larger than China's, and we put out less CO2. The reality is, the US economy is radically more efficient when it comes to CO2 emissions compared to China. US per capita GDP is between nine and ten times higher than China, but CO2 emissions per capita are four times higher.

There's a lot of room for improvement, and we should keep improving, but China isn't even close on economic output to CO2 output.

It's a beautiful visualization but isn't it quite misleading for China? If you don't count the EU as one block, China is the world's second economy and it is considered to have a gigantic middle-class, in the hundreds of millions (650 million chinese expected to be middle-class by 2022: that is in eight years).

I mean: the big cities in China should clearly appear in blue no?

No, the big cities shouldn't shouldn't be blue. The average person in eg Shanghai isn't earning over $12,000 per year. Purple most likely however.

"Shanghai's urban residents, with an average disposable income of 40,188 yuan (US$6,379) last year, earned the most among China's 21 provincial areas that have posted their income growth, according to the latest data."

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-01/26/content_27800262.ht...

Great visualization, but this would be much more interesting if it accounted for differences in income within countries as well.

It weird how Equatorial Guinea seems to have the highest income levels out of the whole of Africa. I wonder why that is?

Worldwide demand for their pigs.

Substantial oil and gas. $26k GDP per capita (only 700,000 people).

And almost all of that money goes to dictator Obiang, his family and his cronies. Equatorial Guinea is the quintessential kleptocracy.

There are more data there but the map that greets you is quite striking, and shows income distribution across the globe.

Yeah, but it's sad they haven't made any effort to correct for population density. So it's only the overall colour of a country that carries information, the hues just tell you where people live (but you might mistake them for meaning something else, be careful!)

If you're saying that the hues correlate primarily to population density as a whole (eg blue vs yellow), that's blatantly false. I believe it's consistent world-wide, that within any given country, the metros earn far more than rural areas, so that's a correct relationship as well. They've also color adjusted within the countries properly. There is a very noticeable difference between different economic zones in China for example (ditto Brazil, or Japan, and so on).

I think Tombone5 meant Saturation and not Hue. There are only 4 colors in that chart, the Saturation represent the density of population.

It's true that if you don't pay attention to the caption, you might think that the lighter areas within a country represent the richest people in that country, but no, it's only the population density.

I think you're probably spot on, re: hue vs saturation. Thanks for that.

It would seem true that the higher population densities (within a given country) would almost always correlate to higher incomes (relative to that country) as well. I'm not aware of too many cases where the cities with the highest population densities in a country don't tend to have among the highest average incomes as well.

What are those low income islands in south and middle america?

Can you elaborate on where you mean?

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