Gapminder: The Bubble Chart That Rearranged How People See the World

Gapminder is a chart that changes people’s minds. Every country on Earth appears as a bubble, sized by population, positioned by income on one axis and life expectancy on the other. Then you press play, and two hundred years happen in about a minute. The bubbles crawl up and to the right. Wars punch holes in the pattern. Epidemics drag whole continents downward and then release them. By the time it stops, the world you were picturing at the start has been replaced with a considerably more accurate one.

What is Gapminder?

Hans Rosling was a Swedish professor of international health who kept noticing the same thing: his students’ picture of the world was roughly forty years out of date. They pictured a planet split cleanly into rich Western countries and a poor “developing world,” a division that had genuinely existed in 1965 and had been steadily dissolving ever since. Facts stated plainly did not fix this. So he built the chart.

Gapminder, the foundation he founded with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund, exists to fight what it calls “devastating ignorance” about global development. Not political disagreement, just plain factual wrongness, the kind that survey after survey shows is worse than random guessing. Rosling liked to point out that chimpanzees picking answers at random beat highly educated audiences on his multiple-choice questions, because the humans were not guessing randomly, they were guessing systematically wrong.

The animated bubble chart, now called the Trendalyzer or simply Gapminder Tools, is the flagship. Google acquired the original software in 2007 and the team later rebuilt an open version. You can swap either axis for any of hundreds of indicators, resize bubbles by a different variable, color by region, and trail individual countries through time.

Around it sits everything else the foundation makes: the Dollar Street project, which photographs homes at every income level worldwide so you can see what living on a given income actually looks like; the Worldview Upgrader quizzes; free downloadable slides and datasets; and the book Factfulness, which packaged the whole argument for a general audience.

The consistent message is not that everything is fine. It is that things are usually both bad and better than before, and that most people are stuck holding a picture where the second half is missing.

What can you do with Gapminder?

• Play the two-century animation. The default income-versus-life-expectancy view with the play button is still the single most effective thing on the site.
• Change the axes. Hundreds of indicators are available: child mortality, CO2 per capita, years of schooling, internet users, fertility rate. Any of them can go on either axis.
• Track individual countries. Select a country and switch on trails to watch its path through the chart, which makes historical shocks like famines, wars and epidemics visually obvious.
• Take the Worldview Upgrader quiz. A handful of multiple-choice questions about global facts. Nearly everyone does badly, and the explanations are the point.
• Browse Dollar Street. Photographs of real homes sorted by monthly income rather than by country, showing beds, toilets, toothbrushes and toys across the whole income range.
• Download the data. Cleaned, documented, long-run datasets are available for free, including the historical reconstructions that make the two-century view possible.
• Grab the teaching materials. Free slide decks, videos and lesson plans, openly licensed for classroom use.

Tips to get the most out of it

Watch the animation before you touch any settings. The default view exists because it works. Press play, watch it once end to end, and only then start changing indicators. Rearranging things first robs you of the moment where the pattern lands.

Take the quiz before you read anything else. Doing badly is the intended experience and it is far more persuasive than being told you would do badly. It also gives you a baseline for how wrong your mental model was.

Switch the x-axis to a log scale and leave it there. Income spans several orders of magnitude, so a linear axis crushes most of the world into a single stripe on the left. Log scale is the honest default for this kind of data.

Use trails on two countries at once. Comparing, say, South Korea against a country with a similar 1960 starting position is far more informative than watching all two hundred bubbles at the same time.

Read the source notes. Gapminder is unusually honest about where its long historical series come from and where the numbers are reconstructions rather than measurements. If you are going to cite a figure, click through and see how it was built.

Pair it with Dollar Street. The bubble chart gives you the abstraction, and the photographs give you what the abstraction is made of. Doing both in one sitting is much more effective than either alone.

If you like Gapminder, also try…

• Our World in Data: the natural next stop, with long-form research behind every chart.
• Worldometers: the same global statistics as live counters ticking in real time.
• Information Is Beautiful: data visualization treated as a design discipline rather than a reporting one.
• The Pudding: visual essays that use charts to argue rather than just to illustrate.

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