Maps that illustrate the global economy | Hacker News Reader

Maps that illustrate the global economy

vox.com

158 pointsejr40 comments

Observations. I think many people would benefit from meditating over the tremendous significance of map #26: Asia is ridiculously important.

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.

I don't know if its the world or me that changed in the last year or so, but I've reached some kind of point with this evangelical sounding language, especially (but not exclusively) when it was a hard left bent. It hits me like listening to a 5 year old talk about surrendering themselves to Jesus. " global capitalist system seeks to change this, often by stealing their land at gunpoint or children with the lure of materialism"

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.

I agree that the statement is general and grating and may come across as questionable. In fact, I travel extensively and live in the developing world and my perspective is based on my own observations across many continents and two decades, plus media consumption, meetings with extensive NGO workers, diplomats, journalists and so on. You are of course more than entitled to an alternative perspective, I'd simply wager it's not as well founded.

Thank you. I will consider forming one.

>The global capitalist system seeks to change this, often by stealing their land at gunpoint..

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.

Why stoop to raw interpretation of metaphorical illustration?

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.

Most interesting to me is unremarked by the article. #5 showing North and South Korea, also shows a virtual city of light in the middle of the Sea of Japan.

A little Googling shows its fisherman attracting the squid to the surface with massive lights. Who knew?

I enjoyed this collection.

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.

The very notion of a center of X makes a lot of sense when such a simplification is useful. For mass, the center of mass is a lossless (or nearly so) simplification. In physics, the movement of complex object can be understood with only its center of mass.

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 center itself is not important. The point is to show an evolution through time. Geographic distribution are clearer and more precise but only handy for a given instant.

Perhaps centre of a graph is more useful - economic activity is almost always an edge between two nodes, so the usefulness of graph theory seems apt (and afaik common) with economics - so a map showing the volume / value of transactions between actors would perhaps be useful - I have not seen all the maps here but it would presumably see NYC glowing with shipping and financial nodes ...

I see a big theoretical and practical problem with Figure 2's projection of a 3D center of gravity to our planet's surface. For now, lets ignore all the other problems (e.g. does calculating a "center" really help answer useful questions).

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.

The maps with a barycenter might be clearer with a polar projection, since the barycenter is so close to the North Pole.

That is exactly the method they use. Calculate the centre of economic gravity, then project it onto the closest point on the surface of the globe.

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:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034394

I particularly found map #4, the Federal Reserve map, to be very interesting. An artifact of politics from days gone by the still has influence today. Does the Fed always move as whole or is there any real infighting going on there?

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

The individual banks are charged with monitoring banking activity and economic conditions within their districts. Their isn't real infighting, but the different banks do bring different views to the table, especially as one area of the country may be booming while another is hurting.

> how difficult it is to get people to use toilets

The mind boggles

Regarding #4, traditionally there's a great effort to project unanimity by the Fed board, but that broke down a bit in the recent crisis, and there's always a bit of behind the scenes politicking.

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...

Okay, if your traditions prohibit crapping in your house - no problem, build a network of decent outhouses. I mean, if most dirt-poor 15th century subsistence farmers could build an outhouse for themselves, then that should be no problem for a 21th century farming villages with government support.

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.

The ironic thing is that the Vijayanagara Empire in India (Peak 1500s) had extensive water management and sanitation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayanagara_Empire). This was 300 years before London had its first severs.

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.

http://www.vox.com/a/how-the-us-is-changing is another good read if you enjoyed this

Doesn't the second map (Economic centrer of gravity map) [0] depend on the projection you use? I.e. if you'd shift the map so that the Americas are in the middle of the picture, then wouldn't the "center of gravity" end up in the US?

[0] - http://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/666632/mck...

My reading of the caption is that they projected the 3d center of gravity out to or down onto a 3d surface of the earth (along the line connecting the center of gravity to the center of the planet).

Yes. I think that there are some problems there.

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.

No, it shouldn't. The caption says it the center of mass was calculated in 3D then projected onto the closest surface point. Changing the projection used wouldn't change the position of this point.

Map 3 World Light Map shows many light points in Western Australia. I thought that there is negligible population in this area. Is the map incorect or .. why?

Mining. See this link for example

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a-mys...

The original title promises maps that explain the global economy and of course it does nothing of the sort.

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.

"increasingly" implies it didn't start there to begin with. I'm pretty sure "intellectually pretentious Buzzfeed" was the entire point.

Little remark about the map 'Unemployment in Europe'

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.

Well, the data comes from Eurostat, which has its own definition of "Unemployed person"[1], which from what I can tell is independent of the country's social security system.

[1] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....

I cannot speak for the rest of the world, but Spain and Italy have similar systems, so even if in absolute the measure is not exact, the comparison it's still meaningful.

What's interesting to me, looking at that map, is how much northern Italy is closer to the rest of Europe than the south.

There has always been a contrast in Italy between the north and the south regions, due to their varied history, in terms of economy, and not only.

It's not uncommon for a country (I would say it´s perfectly normal) to have areas with an higher concentration of wealth compared to others, but in Italy the contrast it´s particularly stark, possibly due to its very shape.

It probably has more to do with history than the shape. The Veneto, where I live, was an independent republic for longer than the United States has been a going concern. The south tended to be bandied about between various foreign powers, feudal states, and so on.

First map - first question. Is UAE/Saudi (in black like USA) actually got > 50k per head, or is that per head of citizens instead of per head of acini if participants (large immigrant worker population)

And would counting Americas cardless Mexicans affect the per capita count too?

Map 9 is so badly coloured; the black lines indicate the largest volume of trade, but blend into the background. The red lines pop out, but represent the least trade.

I love Map 10 though, principal exports, very interesting.

It might be interesting to see a measure of spread visualized alongside the center of gravity (figure 2), perhaps using a translucent circle of varying radius.

Map 13 somehow misses Germany as the top exporter after China with roughly 1 trillion € in exports. Maybe they are netting intra-EU trade?

Nice collection and analysis, these maps are mostly right out of wikipedia but includes a good analysis and research

This was wonderful. Thanks for posting OP.

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