I'm not overly prone to hero-worship, but that's not to say that I don't have a few: they include soldiers, scientists, philosophers and musicians, from Garibaldi to Richard Feynman. One of these heroes died in February of this year, Hans Rosling a Swedish doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. That may not sound a typically heroic CV, but his heroism consisted in inventing ways to make statistics both exciting and comprehensible to the public, then deploying this ability for a humane end, namely to counteract panic about overpopulation. This wasn't speculation, but based on his early experience as a doctor in various developing countries.
His brilliant 2013 documentary "Don't Panic - the Truth About Population" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E) employed state-of-the-art Musion 3D animated infographics to show that as a nations' population achieves higher living standards their average fertility drops so steeply that total world population is already peaking, and is set to plateau at around 11 billion by 2100. And he believed this number could be fed if resources (particularly African land) were sensibly used. To be sure 2013 now feels like a previous epoch in which one could sensibly assume people would get steadily more prosperous, and that no crackpot religion would take power to push the birthrate back up again.
Anyhow, I wanted to pay tribute to Rosling's amazing facility with statistics and his belief that when used properly they reveal truths that can help us survive, and so I've devised a thought-experiment that might have appealed to his impish Scandinavian sense of humour. It goes something like this.
Create a 3D coordinate system with three orthogonal axes labelled Knowledge, Fame and Wealth. Define these three quantities simplistically but pragmatically by devising functions to extract them from existing available databases. For example you might create a Knowledge function that compiles each person's years of primary, secondary and possibly tertiary education; Fame might be derived from a person's extended family size, to which add Google hits on their name, Facebook and Twitter friends, and for a few add professional data like number of TV or movie performances, books published, sporting successes and so on; Wealth would have to come from government tax databases, bank records (pehaps supplemented from the Panama Papers) and similar. Compile these three parameters for every person in the world, then plot them all into your 3D space.
You'll protest that this is impossible and I'll agree, but will then point out that a) it's only a thought-experiment and b) think back to the 2016 US election when certain Big Data firms like Cambridge Analytics claimed to have done something not too far off for most of the US electorate. It's nowhere near so far-fetched as it was even two years ago.
What you'd now be looking at is a solid of roughly spherical proportions close to the origin, containing the vast majority of the world population, with numerous spiky protuberances that contain all the world's academics, celebrities and plutocrats: a sort of world hedgehog. The length and volume of these protuberances would be a measure of the inequalities along all three axes. Now let's get more implausible still, by updating this chart on a yearly basis and animating it in Rosling/Musion style, so that it throbs and twitches, grows and shrinks in various directions.
If you could project the data back into the medium-distant past you'd see the effect of various political programs and social movements: following World War Two the whole sphere would expand along at least the Wealth and Knowledge axes, up until the late 1970s when Wealth motion might cease, and may even go into reverse. From that point onwards you'd see some swelling along the Fame axis as the internet gives more people their Warholian 15 minutes, but the spikes along Fame and Wealth directions would grow enormously longer and far thinner as Wealth becomes far more concentrated. As for Knowledge, who knows: are we really getting smarter or dumber? It's easy to jump to conclusions here. Literacy is still probably increasing through much of the developing world, except where religious extremists obstruct it, while university attendance has continued to spread in the developed world, but may soon go into reverse due to massively increased costs - and there are furious arguments about quality and maintenance of standards. I do wish I had this experiment running and could see the "real" picture.
I'm sure you know that cynical modern proverb "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese". Well this proverb, like my thought experiment, illustrates the difference between natural and social competition. In human societies the playing field is anything but flat, in fact it's a spiky surface, something like a naval mine or huge sea urchin.
That's a marvellous idea! I tend to use Spotfire for visualisations, and if you have the data you could definitely do it using that. Trouble is, where do you get the data? As Mrs. Beeton said 'first catch your rabbit'.
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