Every chart
59 charts so far, newest first. One a day, each with its source and the reasoning behind 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.