Baseline map for international comparisons

The next time you see a nice color-coded GIS map of a statistic, you should think twice about the way the data are being presented. Countries’ size on the map is determined by their land mass, not their population. Though the shapes are familiar, any geographic projection subtly adds influence to some countries and steals it from others. Greenland is the famous example from grade school. The map conditions us to ignore countries with high population density, even major powers such as India and China, and to assume that countries with low population density are more important.

This unfamiliar shape should be the basis for comparisons of human statistics: wealth, income, health, literacy, the things that matter most.

This cartogram by Worldmapper shows country size in proportion to population, not land mass.

Source: Worldmapper.org

Worldmapper

This is another great site for cartograms. The Worldmapper site has a wealth of world cartograms based on country statistics. For those of you that don’t remember, a cartogram begins with a base map, e.g., the Mercator projection of the earth. The cartogram distorts the map such that country boundaries remain contiguous, but the area of each country reflects the size of the statistic in question.

What this enables us to do is to make sensible comparisons of a huge variety of data at a glance. Whereas it would be difficult to absorb a table of statistics for every country in the world normalized by country size or by population, the world map gives a very rough, first cut in seconds.