Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
appears slightly more interested than does Western Europe. Almost no-one in Africa or
South Asia has seen the maps you have just been looking at, and just a handful of people
have seen them in South America, East Asia and the Asia Pacific. How this map will change
in the future we do not know, but having access to an infrastructure like the Web does not
imply equal use of all it has to offer. Far more people have the luxury of time to browse and
read in the richest parts of the world as compared with those living on most of this planet.
Text Box 5.32: Who's Looking at Us?
The Worldmapper project aims to communicate information that is collected about
how we live together in the world, using maps. This map shows that the most people
who have referred to the Worldmapper website live in the United States, the UK,
Germany, Canada, Australia and the Republic of Korea.
Viewing is affected by Internet access and language spoken (at the time of data
collection the website was only available in English). The map of Internet users in 1990
looked similar to this map - by 2002 the Internet users map had changed considerably.
Perhaps a similar pattern will happen with Worldmapper visitors . . .
it is of the greatest importance that the peoples of the earth learn to understand
each other as individuals across distances and frontiers.
(Pearl Buck, 1938)
5.3 The champagne glass of income distribution
Some of the huge disparities in the way we live should now be clear; the uneven nature of
the distributions is epitomized by the 'champagne glass of income' shown in Figure 5.35.
The height of the graph is split into five, each section representing one-fifth of the world
population; the area of the 'champagne glass' shows how much of the incomes around the
world go to the richest fifth (82.7 per cent) through to the poorest fifth (1.4 per cent).
The stem of the glass is getting thinner. In 1960 the income of the wealthiest fifth was
30 times greater than that of the poorest fifth; now it is more than 80 times greater. The
'champagne glass' is looking less like a champagne glass. As some of those richest fifth
are sure to agree, a champagne glass would normally have a taller section to contain the
liquid. A glass drawn to represent wealth (this includes liquid and solid assets which may
be passed between generations) would look more like a 'T' shaped stand than any sort of
drinking vessel. Recently the World Institute for Development Economics Research (part of
the United Nations University) reported that the richest 1 per cent of people in the world
own 40 per cent of the world's wealth (Randerson, 2006).
These maps have provided just a glimpse of some aspects of the conditions of human
life worldwide. This story has shown births and deaths, work and earnings, travel and
spending, and the increase in ease of communications between people. These cartograms
are scientifically (in the natural science sense) interesting as they result from the beauty
and elegance of solving an algorithmic problem. These cartograms are also scientifically (in
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