Sugar per Person per Day, Over Time

Gapminder is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using statistics to change the world for the better. I just used its online graph-creating software, Trendalyzer (acquired in 2007 by Google), to create a chart of how per capita sugar consumption has changed in the U.S., India, China, and Germany over time (guess who wins?).  It’s neat to look at even in the static version you see above, but what’s even cooler is the fact that Trendalyzer makes statistics move! Woah! To see it in action, go here and click “Play.”

WARNING: This shit is addictive. I also made graphs showing how increasing gender equality smacks down poverty, how access to water swirls infant mortality down the drain, and how cellphones exploded onto the globe beginning in the 1980s. (That last one isn’t terribly revealing, but it’s fun to watch.) I also tried to graph the correlation between the number of billionaires in a country and the number of disasters of various kinds, but sadly there was insufficient data on this point to prove a clear causal relationship.

It’s all pretty amazing—and just plain pretty. And, of course, much of the available data reveals—in a fashion that’s dramatic and hard to ignore—facets of global inequality, those gaps the site is minding.

Last time we wrote about an interactive graph it was a even little more morbid.