What has The World experienced?
In light of recent world events, I thought it would be interesting to explore what experiences people currently living in the world have had. After all, experiences play a large part in shaping our decisions and actions.
Using Age Distribution Data from United Nations and a short list of Major World Events from Wikipedia, I put together this animated visualization (best viewed on a wide screen in landscape mode):
The X-axis represents a timeline of major world events and the Y-axis represents number of people born each year. It can be seen from the chart that more than one in four people (roughly 26%) currently living in the world were born after 2001 and weren’t alive when September 11 attacks happened. This was surprising to me.
It was even more surprising to see how this varied among different countries. In developing countries such as Niger, where population is growing at an alarming rate of 3.9% annually, more than one in two people were born after 2001:
On the other hand, in developed countries such as Germany, about one in eight people (roughly 13%) were born after 2001. Germany’s birthrates were highest in 1964 during the baby boom after Second World War, which matches the peak seen in chart below:
More direct impact of wars and and genocides is clearly evident in population distributions of several countries. While there are many examples of Second World War casualties in Russia, China, Germany and Poland, a more recent example is that of Cambodia:
The dip in the chart represents Khmer Rouge rule from 1975 to 1979, during which up to 2 million, nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s then population, died due to mass executions, torture, famine and disease.
Another phenomenon clearly visible from the visualization is immigration. Qatar has recently been under fire for providing poor working conditions for immigrant workers, especially those working on construction projects for World Cup 2022. From a population of mere 593k people in 2000, Qatar has grown to 2.29M people in 2016 with almost 90% of today’s population composed of immigrants. Here is a time lapse showing this astounding growth:
I am certain there are many many more interesting tidbits I haven’t listed here. Check out what your country has experienced and post a comment if you notice something interesting.
Technical details:
- The visualization was built mostly using D3 and Polymer. Source code is on GitHub.
- Population distribution for 2016 is based on projected data. United Nations publishes yearly data on population distribution in July of the following year. Last available actual data is from 2015.
