I have to say, a lot of those fancy info-graphic data-visualization techniques, designed to make numbers and statistics easier to absorb, often just leave me confused.

The video above from the folks at gapminder.org is an exception.

I love how Rosling has to narrate the graph as it's changing, like he's a baseball play-by-play announcer. (And I love his accent.)

You can play with the graph here.

I think the danger with these things is that the presentation looks so slick you forget to question the underlying assumptions. It bugs me when people display data without giving any sense for the precision. (Do we really know what China's per-capita income was in 1832?)

Thanks to my colleague Joanne Silberner for the links. She saw one of these presentations at a conference and said it was the first time she'd seen slides get a round of applause.

categories: Fun With Economics

8:28 - June 5, 2009

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