Global Health Visualization

^{Click here for the source code/sketch}

In reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, I learned about several different global health indices such as the Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index and the Happy Planet Index, which factor in several facets of human life to assess its quality. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been referenced as the primary indicator for a country’s wellbeing and development, and I was interested in how each of these factors related to one another. My main question started as:

How does GDP misrepresent the wellbeing of a population?

In researching this topic, it became clear that even these datasets that attempted to answer my question were not exempt from built-in inequity. The four metrics I was able to find for the largest number of individual countries were: GDP, IHDI, CO2 emissions, and HPI

By visualizing this data, I wanted to represent the HPI scores of each country with their contributions to the global GDP. When I was compiling the data, I noticed that the GDP of an individual country seemed to increase proportionally with its CO2 emissions. Ideologically, I thought it was appropriate to link the HPI with the IDHI. The result is an abstract representation of the selected country as a relationship between its output and the wholistic indices that assess country happiness.

Going Forward

Moving forward, I’d like to add to this project in the following ways:

Add new functionality

Create an input or selection menu to update the visualization
Fine tune the relationships between the indices
Iterate on representation of the data to reveal more potential relationships

Increase data scope

Update the dataset to cover more time
Dig in to the factors that help create the HPI or IHDI
Find a better way to normalize some of the data