Gapminder: visualising poverty data
Gapminder (flash site) is a website that makes it easy to browse country income statistics by visualising them in nice, colorful graphs and animations that suit the attention span of my generation.
YABFG – Yet Another Beta From Google -, Gapminder combines data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and the United Nations Common Database.
It’s somewhat terrifying to have Gapminder replay an animation that shows the income group each country is in, from 1960 to 2000 – and almost nothing changes. Rich countries stay rich, poor countries stay poor. Only the populations grow, and a few new countries pop up.
So much for economic development.
Why they call it "free software for a world in motion" is beyond me, though. It’s gratis, that’s about it.