In this 2007 TED talk, Hans Rosling compares GDP and child mortality rates between countries over long periods of time. He makes some interesting comparisons – today’s “developing” or “emerging” countries have GDP similar to the U.S. about a hundred years ago (all adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, I assume), but they are much more advanced in terms of health and living standards than the U.S. was then. By animating over time, you can see how the catching up process occurred particularly after World War II. These plots are interesting because they show child mortality and GDP in two dimensions, but then use colors and bubbles to add various third variables like education level or carbon emissions.

I have to critique a little bit, I can’t help it. He mentions that GDP growth statistically explains 80% of the gains in child mortality. I accept the statistics, but I don’t think GDP growth is logically the cause of these gains. I suspect there are a couple key technologies, vaccination and water disinfection, that can probably explain a lot of the trend, and the discovery of these technologies happened to occur at a certain time in history. 100 years ago, when the U.S. was passing a threshold to join the club of truly wealth countries, we were in the early stages of discovering and implementing these trends. Today, when countries in Asia and South America are joining the club, these technologies are well established. So it’s not just about wealth, it’s about where we are at a particular moment of history. Logically, there can be periods where the world makes large gains in quality of life without equally large increases in financial wealth, and also the opposite.