Population, economic growth and ecological damage - a peek under the hood

[Iterate]

20. Gapminder

http://www.gapminder.org/ is Hans Rosling's site that integrates graphics and data. I can't begin to count the number of hours I've spent mousing around there. You probably already know about it, but I'm sure others do not.

One thing I really like about it and find most useful is the ability to easily track each nation through time. More often than not the results can be complex, or puzzling, or counter-intuitive. Sometimes nations seem to be drawn to an universally optimum level, as with lifespan, and other times variables seem to be culturally dependent.

Whether health and longevity either leads or follows economic development seems to be less important than the existence of the programs themselves. It's the old soap, water, vaccines, and calories argument, and it's convincing. Population increases, but the rate of increase declines. Decrease in infant mortality comes after the overall decline in mortality.

What drives population down significantly isn't economic disruption as much as society-wide warfare sufficient to disrupt the soap-water-vaccine-calories infrastructure. The example you have of the Soviet Union shows up clearly in a log-log plot of child mortality and pop growth. China too. The collection of countries in the lower left of that plot is pretty interesting, i.e. what do Japan, Serbia, Iceland, and Cuba have in common?

The site's pretty interesting for looking at historical CO2 by nation as well, but that's for another post.