Saturday, November 24

The World in Tenths

In the United Nations Human Development Report of 2005 on page 37 there is a fascinating graph made by World Bank senior economist Yuri Dikhanov titled: Where the money is


This graph compares the average incomes from the richest to the poorest countries in the world and separates them into fifths (20% x 5).  It also chooses a wine glass graphic to represent it.  

These two choices (representing the world in fifths, and using a "wine glass" graph) I believe gives a skewed understanding of what the data actually represents.  

I dug through the original data to find the same percentages in tenths so I could then make the above chart as a regular bar graph.  The result is below: 



It makes me think of the phrase: "If you give ten people ten cents each, eventually one person will have a dollar and the rest will have nothing"


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