I don’t get sentimental about much, but I get sentimental about the planet. I found this animation of NASA’s Blue Marble images on 40 maps that explain the world.
Incidentally, there was another map that depicted income inequality in the developed world, relative to the US, which makes it starkly clear that we have a ways to go:
The next map that caught my eye was one about the world rankings for child wellbeing, with a link to an alarming article (US kids worse off than many of their Western counterparts):
The report, which compares kids in 29 Western countries, measures well-being across five metrics: material well-being, health and safety, behaviors and risks, housing and environment, as well as education. It ranks the United States in the bottom third on all five measures of well-being and particularly low on education and poverty. The United States is joined at the bottom by “emerging” European economies, while the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands come out on top. The report notes that this latter group of countries tends to spend far more per capita on social welfare programs.
The countries with the best reported child well-being tend to invest in strong social safety nets. Norway, Iceland and Sweden sink nearly 7 percent of their GDP, according to an OECD report, into education. Countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which until the ‘90s had GDPs per capita of less than $5,000, have been able to put less money into such services. Though U.S. GDP per capita was more than $48,000 in 2012, that money is not spread evenly cross the unusually large U.S. population.
As we noted earlier, one of the report’s more alarming findings for the United States is the degree to which income inequality has increased the population of children who grow up in relative poverty, meaning that America’s famously abundant wealth does not equally benefit all children. Economists rate the U.S. economy as one of the most unequal in the Western world.
…As the report notes, these types of statistics are interesting less as a snapshot of the present than a predictor of the future.
“At the heart of the case to be made is the fact that childhood is a time in which future patterns and pathways of health and well-being are being laid down and in which disruption can have lifelong consequences. Protecting the years of childhood is therefore essential both for the well-being of those who are children today and for the well-being of the societies of tomorrow.”
If you’re interested in maps and stats, I came across a very good book in my research on immigration called People On the Move: An Atlas of Migration. It deals with past and present migration, as well as tangential issues like remittances to the developing world by migrant labor. There’s a whole series of these informative short atlases, but this one is the best I’ve seen so far. Amazingly, you can page through the entire book on Issuu. Use the link to get to the larger view.