
World Income Mapped by Location - jamesbritt
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/age-of-man/map-interactive#b02g21t20w14
======
adventured
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.

------
TacticalCoder
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?

~~~
adventured
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...](http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-01/26/content_27800262.htm)

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
Tombone5
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!)

~~~
adventured
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).

~~~
vmarsy
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.

~~~
adventured
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.

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

~~~
adventured
Can you elaborate on where you mean?

