At a Glance, and Fun: Where Will Innovation and Growth Show Up Next?

Back when the Internet was newish, my friends and I had a tacit agreement: We would not email one another to insist "Hey! Look at this neat Website!" unless it was something that would A) add materially to our existence or B) make us laugh until we experienced pain. I recently came across a terrific Website of the A) variety. If you're an investor, it really could add materially to your existence, on top of which it's fun. It's called Worldmapper, and it may well tell us where in the world market innovations and economic growth are likely to occur next.

Created by geographers from the University of Sheffield, Worldmapper lets them turn all kinds of obscure and non-obscure information into vividly colored pictures. A country will look fat or thin according to its share of population or trade or children or tractors or education or whatever, but still retain its familiar national-boundary shape. Imagine the U.S.(which is purple; China is bright green, India's orange, Western Europe is shades of brownish pink, Russia is khaki, Southeast Asia's white, and so on) plumped up like a U.S.-shaped balloon (Primary Education Spending, Science Research, Female Managers) or skinny and shrunk to nothing (Slum Growth, Women in Agriculture, Natural Products Exports). Truly at a glance, without tedious eye-crossing lists of data, you can see where any country stands in comparison to any other country in any of 28 major categories including Population, Education, Manufacture, Service, Food, Pollution, Income, Resources, Health, Wealth and Transport, and hundreds of subcategories. The results are occasionally cartoonish but they're statistically accurate.

So where will innovation and economic growth show up? The Total Children map shows a bulbous India, China and Southeast Asia, but not every child will grow up to be an innovator, although they will probably be consumers. Is Youth Literacy a predictor? China, India, Japan and Southeast Asia dwarf everybody else in this category. Secondary-Education Spending Growth? Western Europe, South Korea, Malaysia and China beat us here. Machine exports? Western Europe and Japan are indeed cartoonishly large on this one, and the U.S. is not to be seen. But in Total R&D Expenditures and Royalties and License Fee Exports, the U.S. wins walking away. Almost all the Export maps show the U.S. looking pretty anemic and the Import maps just the opposite, but we knew that. (For kicks I looked at Crude Petroleum Exports. It showed the Middle East and environs blown up to the size and shape of a hot-air balloon.)

I brought up a number of Wealth and Poverty maps because in addition to a country's dependency ratio (the ratio of non-working to working people, about which I've written before with some intensity), I believe a very sure predictor of future economic growth is a large proportion of families moving from working class to middle class, without a too-wild economic or social imbalance between rich and poor — pretty much what the U.S. looked like right after the second world war. That map I couldn't find.

To use Worldmapper, click here or paste this into your browser: http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/index.html