Gapminder is a great site that has a lot of useful statistics on world development presented as nice visual bubble maps. Here is their latest world map, showing GDP vs life expectancy:
The X axis has GDP, the Y axis has life expectancy. Each country is a circle, it’s area being proportional to the population. Each continent is coloured differently. A few of my points below but I suggest you have a good look for yourself. This is the real map of the world today
- yes the 2 metrics often aren’t that meaningful but most of the time they’re pretty good indicators of general conditions
- as Gapminder often shows the world is steadily improving on all counts with most countries moving toward the top-right corner in the last few years
- the only exception in the last decade has been sub-Saharan Africa with a lot of countries moving in the wrong direction (probably influenced by infectious disease, genocide and agricultural/economic problems)
- there is an obvious line of best fit showing a very strong correlation, but the interesting countries are those way above-below the line
- countries with life expectancy way lower than it “should” be based on GDP: Russia (alcoholism/crime), Nigeria (disease/crime), South Africa (the biggest disparity — HIV/crime)
- other countries are pulled down probably because of a lack of infrastructure, landmines, the aftermath of war etc (eg. Angola, Rep of Congo)
- the worst life expectancy countries are probably what a lot of people had 200 years ago, so for some of them it’s as if they never went through modern medicine, sanitation etc.
- countries that are doing well on health compared to their GDP: Vietnam (better than the much richer Brazil), Bangladesh (better than the much much richer Russia), Cuba, Chile, Philippines, Indonesia
- not sure if I see a pattern — a lot of these are fairly peaceful countries but Philippines and Indonesia have their fair share of violence
- finally the scale is logarithmic which shows perfectly the diminishing returns on healthcare: at the bottom to increase life expectancy by 10 years you need just $1500 more per person per year — but at the top to increase by 10 years you need to go from $5000 a year to $50000 or a whopping $45000 extra to get to the “ripe old” average of 85
2 comments ↓
“GAP” is one of those classical tell-tale political words. I typically dislike the way it is used: as if “Gaps” are always bad things. So I was wondering where your post was going to take it. But I was pleasantly surprised and liked your bullets. Most importantly, for me, is your last bullet of the “logarithmic” scale revealing the diminishing returns on healthcare. I think in most “democratic” governments this diminishing returns is disguised by governments and/or spreads in insurance costs and thus, lack of personal felt consequences on health “purchases” by citizens results in high healthcare costs.
There are many others causes of high cost, of course. But this seems large to me. The solutions I see: (1) a benign dictatorship (vulnerable to evil) or (2) truly free markets (vulnerable to evil). Alas.
Glad you liked it and I recommend checking out Gapminder as a whole, it has a lot of great data. A gap in the sense that Gapminder uses is usually something directly related to people’s well-being. Because of this I think most of these gaps are bad — however some are indeed more related to culture (eg. number of children per family) and these would be more neutral.
I don’t think there’s any disguising needed about diminishing returns since it’s a general economic principle that happens to be true most of the time. However I think we’re looking at different scales. What I mean by it is that when you’re very poor the smallest spending increases lifespan dramatically because the most effective measures are relatively cheap (vaccines, sewage, clean water). At the other end, we get to a society where the “easy” health problems are solved so it’s natural that the “hard” ones are less cost efficient. This would be true even in a rich country with a perfect healthcare system.
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