Every chart
102 charts so far, newest first. One a day, each with its source and the reasoning behind it.
- No. 102England's pharmacies handed out 1.3 billion prescriptions last year, 22 for every person. The most common is atorvastatin, a cholesterol pill: 78 million, nearly three times as many as ten years ago.
- No. 101After two world wars, inheritance in France, Britain and Germany shrank to a fraction of its old size. It has been climbing back ever since.
- No. 100Americans feel worse about the economy than at any point in the 2008 financial crisis. They are also spending more per person than ever.
- No. 99For 66 years, the United States bought more energy from abroad than it sold. Since 2019 it has sold more than it buys.
- No. 98A century ago food ate over 40% of the American household budget; today it is barely an eighth.
- No. 97Africa has the best sunshine on earth and gets 2% of the world's clean-energy investment.
- No. 96Half of all American home loans still charge under 4% interest. A new one now costs 7.4%.
- No. 95China now makes most of the world's solar panels, batteries and electric cars.
- No. 94Two companies decide what software can run on 99 of every 100 phones on earth.
- No. 93Almost all the wealth humanity has ever produced was created after 1950.
- No. 92Norway sold 96% of its new cars as electric last year. The oil and gas it pumps for the world puts about ten times more CO2 into the air than the whole of Norway does.
- No. 91South Korean women now have about 0.7 children each on average, the lowest rate any country has ever recorded.
- No. 90France now pays more to borrow than Italy or Greece. Lenders want the biggest extra reward for lending to France instead of Germany since the euro debt crisis of 2012.
- No. 89The US dollar is on one side of nearly 90% of all currency trades, the swaps of one country's money for another's.
- No. 88India's economy is growing faster than any other big economy, but its stock market has lost 19% this year in dollars. South Korea's has gained 77%. Investors want companies that profit from AI, and India has almost none.
- No. 87AI as good as GPT-4, OpenAI's best model in 2023, got over 200 times cheaper in two years. Job adverts for America's software developers are still 23% below 2020, but up 23% since March 2025.
- No. 86Men outnumbered women at the world's universities until about 2003. Now women are the clear majority: 46% of young women go on to university or college, against 40% of young men.
- No. 85The G7 is releasing 100 million barrels of oil and diesel from its emergency stockpiles. That sounds huge, but it is only three days of what G7 countries use. It still knocked 9% off the price of diesel in two days.
- No. 84AI learns to write by reading the web. After English, the web's biggest languages are Russian, German and Japanese. Hindi, spoken by 611 million people, is a fifth of one percent of it.
- No. 83Nine in ten of the world's most advanced chips are made on a single island.
- No. 82The word “heart” was in 15% of America’s hit songs in 1973 and 44% in 1991. Every big word in pop does this: “love” peaked in 1989, “money” in 2019.
- No. 81The richest tenth of Americans now account for close to half of all American spending.
- No. 80Americans owe more on student loans than on every credit card combined.
- No. 79For most of the last century, the main thing deciding your income was which country you were born in. That has gone into reverse.
- No. 78Video games earn nearly three times as much as every cinema ticket and every record sold on earth, combined.
- No. 77For most of the past decade, English second-tier football clubs have paid out more in wages than they earned in revenue.
- No. 76America, Britain, France, Germany and Japan are all paying the highest interest on their borrowing in at least 15 years. All five got there at the same time.
- No. 75Nearly 7% of Americans with weaker credit are two months behind on their car loan, the most in over 30 years. Among stronger borrowers it is under half a percent.
- No. 74A bitcoin mined in 2013 took less electricity than a single home uses in a year; one mined last year took as much as 460 homes.
- No. 73Fewer than 4% of American stocks produced all of the stock market's gains since 1926. The other 96% collectively did no better than cash.
- No. 72Japanese stocks took 34 years to climb back to their 1989 peak. In dollars it took 31.
- No. 71The world's bond market is worth about $161 trillion. That is more than every share on every stock exchange, more than a year of the whole world's output, and five times all the gold ever mined.
- No. 70Japan has just raised its interest rate to a 31-year high. It is 1.25%.
- No. 69The bond market has made a US president drop his tax cut, an Italian prime minister and a British one resign, and a trade war pause. This week it made the Fed raise rates.
- No. 68The US Federal Reserve has raised interest rates for the first time in three years. The man who did it was chosen by Trump to cut them.
- No. 67A crypto company now lends more money to the US government than Germany does.
- No. 66Africa's lions have collapsed to rhino numbers, about 23,000 of each. Get all the wild lions on the continent and they would fit in a quarter of Wembley football stadium.
- No. 65The richest 1% of Americans take a fifth of all income, the same share as in 1913. In Britain, France, Germany and Canada the richest 1% take an eighth.
- No. 64China made more cement in three years than America made in the whole of the 20th century.
- No. 63146 countries are working on digital cash: money held at the central bank, not at your bank. Three have launched it. America has banned it.
- No. 62About 97% of the money in Britain is not cash. Banks created it by typing numbers when they made loans.
- No. 61America used to trade three times more with Africa than China. Now China trades four times more than America.
- No. 60Light became about 3,000 times cheaper in Britain. Britons responded by using 100,000 times more of it.
- No. 59In 1960 South Korea was poorer than Ghana. It is now richer than Japan.
- No. 58Half the planet's habitable land is farmland. Everything humans have ever built sits on about 1% of it.
- No. 57China has gone from 1% of the world's exports to about 15%, overtaking the United States along the way.
- No. 56Africa's population could nearly triple this century while Europe shrinks.
- No. 55The music industry just had its biggest year ever. Adjusted for inflation it is still a third smaller than in 1999.
- No. 54Every Olympic Games on record has gone over budget. All 23 of them, without a single exception.
- No. 53The world now averages about 2.25 births per woman, just above the 2.1 that keeps a population stable.
- No. 52Electricity is the new inflation. American power bills are up 43% since 2019, half again faster than prices overall.
- No. 51America's average tariff is 11%, the highest since the Second World War.
- No. 50Gold has tripled since 2019. The S&P 500, with every dividend reinvested, is up 160%.
- No. 49Nobody is hiring. Nobody is firing. America's jobs market has frozen.
- No. 48America's economy grew 1.5% last quarter. Strip out the AI buildout and it grew 0.2%.
- No. 47One in nine American adults is on a weight-loss drug, and obesity is falling for the first time on record.
- No. 46China makes more than half the world's steel.
- No. 45Americans legally bet $167bn on sports last year. Eight years ago, outside Nevada, the number was zero.
- No. 44We work almost half as many hours a year as our great-grandparents did.
- No. 43The typical person in Japan is 49. The typical Nigerian is 17.
- No. 42Almost everything humans do stayed flat for centuries, then shot upward after 1950.
- No. 41US borrowing costs hit a 19-year high, so the Treasury started buying its own bonds back.
- No. 40America has the world's biggest defence budget, but spends a smaller slice of its economy on it than Russia or Saudi Arabia.
- No. 39The US government is paying more to borrow for 30 years than at any time since 2004. Japan, which paid almost nothing ten years ago, is at a record.
- No. 38Around 2007 humanity became a mostly urban species for the first time.
- No. 37Chinese families spend a far smaller slice of the economy than almost anyone else.
- No. 36The world's spare savings keep flowing to one place: America.
- No. 35Two centuries ago about three in four people lived in extreme poverty; now fewer than one in ten do.
- No. 34Global life expectancy has more than doubled in a century.
- No. 33Rich countries borrow at 3%. Poor ones pay four or five times as much.
- No. 32Sequencing a human genome cost $100 million in 2001, now it is a couple of hundred dollars.
- No. 31South Korea has more than 1,000 robots for every 10,000 factory workers, the densest on earth.
- No. 30The chip in your pocket holds over a hundred billion transistors; the first held about 2,000.
- No. 29An hour of asking ChatGPT questions uses a few times the energy of a Google search, but only a small fraction of an hour spent streaming Netflix on the television.
- No. 28Every Qatari is worth roughly $1.3m in state oil savings, dwarfing famously rich Norway.
- No. 27In Beijing it takes nearly 30 years of income to buy an average home.
- No. 26Cocoa got so expensive that a tonne of it cost more than a tonne of copper.
- No. 25Almost two-thirds of the world's stock market is American, though the US is only about a quarter of the world economy.
- No. 24The world now hoards more gold than it wears.
- No. 23Almost no US layoffs were blamed on AI two years ago. In May it was the reason given for nearly 40% of them.
- No. 22Nvidia is worth more than the entire stock market of any country in Europe.
- No. 21Gold hit $850 an ounce in 1980. In today's money that was about $3,650, a peak it did not beat for 45 years.
- No. 20Americans have so much spare cash parked in money funds that it earns them about $750 million a day, for doing nothing.
- No. 19Eli Lilly is now worth more than UnitedHealth, on weight-loss drugs alone.
- No. 18Norway's oil fund is worth about $400,000 for every citizen, and most of it is investment profit, not oil money.
- No. 17Six of every ten electric cars sold in the world are now bought in China.
- No. 16OPEC once pumped half the world's oil. Today it is barely a third.
- No. 15China's growth has slid from 14% to just over 4%, missing even its lowest-ever target.
- No. 14The Japanese yen just hit its weakest level against the dollar in 40 years.
- No. 13A one-carat lab-grown diamond cost $4,200 in 2018. Today it sells for under $200.
- No. 12The world is throwing up new trade barriers faster than ever, about 3,000 a year.
- No. 11Seven companies make 70% of the economic profit of the entire S&P 500.
- No. 10Over 200 years, a dollar in stocks became millions; in gold it barely held its value.
- No. 09An hour of work buys about 500,000 times more light than it did two centuries ago.
- No. 08In 2020 and 2021 interest rates fell to their lowest in centuries, some historians say in 5,000 years.
- No. 07The US has twice declared victory over inflation. Both times it came back within six years.
- No. 06The US is running a crisis-sized budget deficit, with no crisis.
- No. 05The US now spends more on interest on its debt than on its entire military.
- No. 04ChatGPT reached a billion users in three years. Facebook took eight.
- No. 03Solar just outproduced coal in the US for the first time ever.
- No. 02The world's central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries for the first time since 1996.
- No. 01Ten companies are now 41% of the S&P 500, the most concentrated it has been since at least 1972.