VIDEO: A history of wealth and lifespan visualized

Special thanks to LA comedian and Office star Rainn Wilson for pointing us to this amazing video explainer from the BBC via his hilarious Twitter feed. He notes: “200 years of history in 4 minutes. brilliant.”

The video features an artful explainer by Hans Rosling set to an animated visualization plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810. Pretty amazing to see how historic events can alter these two stats According to the BBC:

Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before – using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers – in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.