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Author: Pallavi Rao

Interactive: Comparing Military Spend Around the World

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

Comparing Military Spend Around the World

One of the easiest ways to identify a nation’s priorities is by tracking its expenditures, and military spend is no different.

Usually spending is measured, and ranked, in absolute amounts. For example, countries around the world collectively spent $2.1 trillion on their militaries in 2021, with the most coming from the U.S. ($800 billion), China ($293 billion), and India ($77 billion).

But these eye-popping figures are best understood in the context of each country’s economy. Using data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Varun Jain has visualized 158 countries’ military expenditures, both as a percentage of their total GDP as well as in average per-capita spend.

Countries’ Military Spend as a Percentage of their Economy

To begin, Jain identified three categories of military expenditure as a percent of GDP, using the five-year (2018‒2022) average for more consistent data:

Military Spend% of GDPCountries
HighAbove 5%7
Medium2‒5%44
LowBelow 2%107

Under this categorization, the stand outs are the countries spending an outsized amount of their economic output on military, rather than the highest total spenders in absolute terms.

At the top of the table is Ukraine, which has earmarked a staggering average of 9.46% of its total economic output on defense over the past five years. That’s well ahead of second-place Saudi Arabia, which is (Read more...)

Mapped: What Did the World Look Like in the Last Ice Age?

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

Click to view this graphic in a higher-resolution.

A map of the Earth 20,000 years ago, at the peak of the last ice age, when colder temperatures transformed the planet we know so well.

What Did the World Look Like in the Last Ice Age?

What did the world look like during the last ice age? Was it all endless glaciers and frozen ice? The answer is a partial yes—with some interesting caveats.

The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), colloquially called the last ice age, was a period in Earth’s history that occurred roughly 26,000 to 19,000 years ago.

This map by cartographer Perrin Remonté offers a snapshot of the Earth from that time, using data of past sea levels and glaciers from research published in 2009, 2014, and 2021, alongside modern-day topographical data.

Let’s dive into the differences between the two Earths below.

The Last Ice Age: Low Seas, Exposed Landmasses

During an ice age, sea levels fall as ocean water that evaporates is stored on land on a large scale (ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers) instead of returning to the ocean.

Earth's Ice Cover20,000 Years AgoToday
Surface8%3%
Land25%11%

At the time of the LGM, the climate was cold and dry with temperatures that were 6 °C (11 °F) lower on average. Water levels in the ocean were more than 400 feet below what they are now, exposing large areas of the continental shelf.

In the map above, these areas are represented as the gray, dry land most noticeable in a few big patches in Southeast Asia and between Russia and Alaska. Here are a (Read more...)

Ranked: Who Made the Most U.S. Unicorn Acquisitions Since 1997?

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

A bubble chart visualizing the companies that made the most U.S.-based unicorn acquisitions between 1997 and 2021.

Who Made the Most U.S. Unicorn Acquisitions Since 1997?

The elusive unicorn is no longer a myth in the U.S. startup world, with over a thousand private startups reaching a $1 billion valuation in the last 25 years.

While some of these startups eventually go public and go on to become household names, it’s also common for founders to exit through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), by selling their startup to another organization. In fact, over half of the 1,110 unicorns in the U.S. have made some sort of an exit—either through an IPO, a direct listing, a SPAC or an acquisition—since 1997.

Ilya Strebulaev, professor of finance and private equity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, brings us this visualization featuring the companies that acquired the most unicorns over the last 25 years.

Strebulaev’s database lists 137 private and public companies along with PE firms who’ve acquired at least one unicorn since 1997, totaling 177 acquisitions.

The Biggest U.S. Unicorn Acquirers

In total, 27 companies have acquired two or more unicorns, accounting for nearly 38% of all acquisitions. 110 companies have acquired just one unicorn.

Company/ PE GroupAcquired
Meta5
Cisco4
Alphabet4
Amazon3
Nortel Networks3
Bristol-Myers Squibb3
Johnson & Johnson3
Merck & Co.3
AT&T3
Recruit Holdings2
IBM2
Microsoft2
Thoma Bravo2
Headspace Health2
Allergan2
Qualcomm2
Rakuten2
Adobe Systems2
Eli Lilly2
Vista Equity2
Dell2
Uber2
Oracle2
Nestle (Read more...)

Ranked: Who Made the Most U.S. Unicorn Acquisitions Since 1997?

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

A bubble chart visualizing the companies that made the most U.S.-based unicorn acquisitions between 1997 and 2021.

Who Made the Most U.S. Unicorn Acquisitions Since 1997?

The elusive unicorn is no longer a myth in the U.S. startup world, with over a thousand private startups reaching a $1 billion valuation in the last 25 years.

While some of these startups eventually go public and go on to become household names, it’s also common for founders to exit through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), by selling their startup to another organization. In fact, over half of the 1,110 unicorns in the U.S. have made some sort of an exit—either through an IPO, a direct listing, a SPAC or an acquisition—since 1997.

Ilya Strebulaev, professor of finance and private equity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, brings us this visualization featuring the companies that acquired the most unicorns over the last 25 years.

Strebulaev’s database lists 137 private and public companies along with PE firms who’ve acquired at least one unicorn since 1997, totaling 177 acquisitions.

The Biggest U.S. Unicorn Acquirers

In total, 27 companies have acquired two or more unicorns, accounting for nearly 38% of all acquisitions. 110 companies have acquired just one unicorn.

Company/ PE GroupAcquired
Meta5
Cisco4
Alphabet4
Amazon3
Nortel Networks3
Bristol-Myers Squibb3
Johnson & Johnson3
Merck & Co.3
AT&T3
Recruit Holdings2
IBM2
Microsoft2
Thoma Bravo2
Headspace Health2
Allergan2
Qualcomm2
Rakuten2
Adobe Systems2
Eli Lilly2
Vista Equity2
Dell2
Uber2
Oracle2
Nestle (Read more...)

Mapped: All of the World’s Roads, by Continent

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

Click to view this graphic in a higher-resolution.

A road map of the world, visualized by type.

Mapped: All of the World’s Roads, by Continent

Once upon a time, it was said that all roads led to Rome. Now with at least 21 million kilometers of roads spanning the globe, every continent and country has its own web of crisscrossing connections, from major highways to rural drives.

And there’s no better way to see the scale and spread of roads than by visualizing them. Adam Symington from PythonMaps used data from the Global Roads Inventory Project (GRIP) to map all the roads in the world, creating an accurate representation of humanity’s need to connect.

Creating the Global Road Map

The GRIP database pulled information from a variety of sources including governments, research institutes, NGOs, and crowd-sourcing initiatives to create a harmonized dataset of geospatial road information for a 2018 paper, “Global patterns of current and future road infrastructure.”

Researchers categorized roads into types using a UN classification system, which have been visualized in three colors on this map:

CategoryDefinitionColor
Main RoadsHighways + primary roads between and within cities and towns. Multi-lane, limited entry and exit points.White
Secondary RoadsPaved, high-traffic, access between neighborhoodsYellow
Tertiary RoadsPaved or unpaved residential access within neighborhoods, or rural points of interest.Red
Local RoadsAll other smaller roads that don't fit above, and usually are not throughfare.Red

This classification allowed for examining relationships between road infrastructure, development, wealth, and population distribution.

Which Country has the Largest (Read more...)

Visualizing the American Workforce as 100 People

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

Click to view this graphic in a higher-resolution.

Reimagining the American workforce as 100 people and categorizing them by jobs, positions and sectors.

Visualizing the American Workforce as 100 People

In 2022, the U.S. population stood at 333 million. Of that, roughly 60% were employed in various jobs, positions, and sectors in the U.S. economy.

But where did all these people work? What jobs did they do and what positions did they hold? Where do most Americans do their nine-to-five?

Using data from the National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates (2022) put out by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), we reimagine the employed American workforce as only 100 people, to find out answers.

Interestingly, the data contains a mix of information demarcations. Some are job-specific (type of work), some are based on position (like Management), and some are broken down by industry (Transport and Health).

The Most Common Jobs In the U.S.

By far, most of the American workforce (13 out of 100) are employed in Office & Administrative work. This includes a mind-boggling variety of jobs: receptionists, payroll clerks, secretaries, proof-readers, administrative assistants, and customer service representatives to name a few.

Notably, any sort of management role is absent from this, as well as any other job categories, since the BLS categorizes managers in their own class.

The industry which employs the second largest group of people is Health, accounting for 11 people from the 100. This category is a combination of two sectors listed in the original dataset (healthcare practitioners and healthcare support) and covers the entire industry: (Read more...)

Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

View a higher resolution version of graphic.

A grid of donut charts showing the daily routines of 16 great artists, writers, and thinkers.

Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives

What is the best daily routine to unlock creativity, or is there such a thing?

Many modern suggestions for optimizing creativity—like scheduling time for “deep work,” and building small, sustainable “atomic habits”—can be traced back to famous creatives in many different eras. And though they all found success, they employed different methods as well.

In this unique visualization, RJ Andrews from InfoWeTrust has charted how notable creatives in different fields spent their days. He picked 16 of the 161 “inspired minds” covered by Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, a book by writer and editor Mason Currey published in 2013.

How Much “Creativity Time” in Famous Daily Routines?

Dividing the day into 24 hours, Andrews denoted certain categories for daily activities like working creatively, sleeping, and other miscellaneous endeavors (meals, leisure, exercise, and social time).

For the creatives with a separate day job—Immanuel Kant and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—their ordinary labor is also counted in miscellaneous activities.

Below is a breakdown of the daily routine of all 16 people featured above:

NameOccupationCreative (hrs)Sleep (hrs)Miscellaneous (hrs)
Maya AngelouWriter/Poet97.57.5
W.H. AudenPoet11.575.5
Honoré de BalzacNovelist13.58.52
L.V. BeethovenComposer / Pianist888
Le CorbusierArchitect8.578.5
Charles DarwinNaturalist / Biologist/ Geologist789
Charles DickensWriter5712
Gustave FlaubertNovelist10.576.5
Sigmund FreudPsychologist (Read more...)

Charting and Mapping China’s Exports Since 2001

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

A map and graph of the destination and growth of China's exports in the 21st century.

Charting and Mapping China’s Exports Since 2001

Between the dawn of the Roman Empire and the first factory built in the Industrial Revolution, China was one of the most powerful economies on the planet, with a gross domestic product that made up roughly 30% of the global economy.

By the 1970s, the country’s economy had regressed to a shadow of its historic self, with a per-capita income equal to one-third of sub-Saharan Africa. But over the next four decades, China’s rapid industrial transformation made it the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, and exports rapidly ballooned.

Which markets are receiving all of these exports? This graphic from Ehsan Soltani uses data from the World Trade Organization and the customs office of China to track the biggest destinations of China’s merchandise exports—defined as goods that leave the territory of a country—since the 2000s.

China’s Top Export Markets from 2001‒2022

In 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, the value of its merchandise exports stood at $266 billion. Over the next seven years, the country’s exports grew uninterrupted until the 2008 financial crisis caused a sharp decline in global trade.

This cycle would repeat again with consecutive growth until 2015 (another global trade slowdown), followed by slowed growth until 2020 (the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic).

But merchandise exports skyrocketed by 30% in 2021, and by the end of 2022 had grown to an estimated $3.6 trillion per year. That means China’s exports alone are bigger than the entire economies of (Read more...)

Which Jobs Will Be Most Impacted by ChatGPT?

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

Visualizing the impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market

Jobs Most Impacted by ChatGPT and Similar AI Models

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI heralded a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) by introducing ChatGPT to the world.

The AI chatbot stunned users with its human-like and thorough responses. ChatGPT could comprehend and answer a variety of different questions, make suggestions, research and write essays and briefs, and even tell jokes (amongst other tasks).

Many of these skills are used by workers in their jobs across the world, which begs the question: which jobs will be transformed, or even replaced, by generative AI in the coming future?

This infographic from Harrison Schell visualizes the March 2023 findings of OpenAI on the potential labor market impact of large language models (LLMs) and various applications of generative AI, including ChatGPT.

Methodology

The OpenAI working paper specifically examined the U.S. industries and jobs most “exposed” to large language models like GPT, which the chatbot ChatGPT operates on.

Key to the paper is the definition of what “exposed” actually means:

“A proxy for potential economic impact without distinguishing between labor-augmenting or labor-displacing effects.” – OpenAI

Thus, the results include both jobs where humans could possibly use AI to optimize their work, along with jobs that could potentially be automated altogether.

OpenAI found that 80% of the American workforce belonged to an occupation where at least 10% of their tasks can be done (or aided) by AI. One-fifth of the workforce belonged to an occupation where 50% of work tasks would be impacted by artificial (Read more...)

Mapping the World’s Overseas Territories and Dependencies

by Pallavi Rao
This post is by Pallavi Rao from Visual Capitalist

View a higher resolution version of this graphic.

overseas territories and dependencies around the world and their sovereign states.

Overseas Territories and Dependencies of the World

An overseas territory or dependency is a region with ties abroad to a sovereign nation—not a completely independent state, but also not a constituent part or administrative subdivision of the parent country.

Their histories vary, but most are tied to either “modern” colonialism from the 1400s onwards, or wars from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of these regions still depend on their parent country to some capacity for economic, military, and diplomatic affairs.

This graphic by Pranav Gavali maps the overseas territories of various countries, using a variety of sources including WorldAtlas, Statista, and official country releases.

Where are the World’s Overseas Territories and Dependencies?

There are a total of 73 overseas territories listed on the map spread across the world.

It excludes territories claims in Antarctica, which are currently governed by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. As an overseas map, it also excludes territories sharing a border, or that are part of a larger state or province (like Germany’s Heligoland, part of the state of Schleswig-Holstein).

Each region has its own unique present-day status. Some are “autonomous territories” or “constituent countries,” while some are administered almost entirely as part of the parent country.

SovereignOverseas Territory / DependencyRegion
🇦🇺 AustraliaAshmore and Cartier IslandsIndian Ocean
🇦🇺 AustraliaChristmas IslandIndian Ocean
🇦🇺 AustraliaCocos (Keeling) IslandsIndian Ocean
🇦🇺 AustraliaCoral Sea IslandsPacific Ocean
🇦🇺 AustraliaHeard & McDonald IslandsIndian Ocean
🇦🇺 AustraliaNorfolk (Read more...)