Visualizing The 4,000 Year History Of Global Power

Imagine creating a timeline of your country’s whole history stretching back to its inception.

It would be no small task, as VisualCapitalist"s Nick Routley explains, simply weighing the relative importance of so many great people, technological achievements, and pivotal events would be a tiny miracle in itself.

While that seems like a challenge, imagine going a few steps further. Instead of a timeline for just one country, what about creating a graphical timeline showing the history of the entire world over a 4,000 year time period, all while having no access to computers or the internet?

AN ALL-ENCOMPASSING TIMELINE?

Today’s infographic, created all the way back in 1931 by a man named John B. Sparks, maps the ebb and flow of global power going all the way back to 2,000 B.C. on one coherent timeline...

View a high resolution version of this graphic

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Histomap, published by Rand McNally in 1931, is an ambitious attempt at fitting a mountain of historical information onto a five-foot-long poster. Although the distribution of power is not quantitively defined on the x-axis, it does provide a rare example of looking at historic civilizations in relative terms. While the Roman Empire takes up a lot of real estate during its Golden Age, for example, we still get a decent look at what was happening in other parts of the world during that period.

The visualization is also effective at showing the ascent and decline of various states, nations, and empires.

TIMELINE CAVEATS

Since this chart was created at the beginning of the Great Depression, one does have to consider to what extent Sparks saw history as a zero-sum exercise; a collection of nations battling one another for control over scarce territory and resources.

Crowning a world leader at certain points in history is relatively easy, but divvying up influence or power to everyone across 4,000 years requires some creativity, and likely some guesswork, as well. Some would argue that the lack of hard data makes it impossible to draw these types of conclusions (though there have been other more quantitative approaches.)

Another obvious criticism is that the measures of influence are skewed in favor of Western powers. China’s “seam”, for example, is suspiciously thin throughout the length of the timeline.

Lastly, the histomap refers to various cultural and racial groups using terms that may seem rather dated to today’s viewers.

THE LEGACY OF HISTOMAP

John Spark’s creation is an admirable attempt at making history more approachable and entertaining. Today, we have seemingly limitless access to information, but in the 1930s an all encompassing timeline of history would have been incredibly useful and groundbreaking.

Critiques aside, work like this paved the way for the production of modern data visualizations and charts that help people better understand the world around them today.

How The Deep State Squeezed America"s Wealth

Authored by Bill Bonner via InternationalMan.com,

Salvator Mundi, said to be by Leonardo da Vinci, is the world’s most expensive painting.

Last Wednesday, at auction, each square inch was valued at nearly $1 million – including the bummed-up, restored, and damaged parts.

The painting may not be da Vinci’s work. Or perhaps, since it has been so heavily doctored up, little remains of his work. And whoever’s work it was must have been having a bad day.

And yet, it sold for over $450 million (including auction-house charges) – a lot of money for such a depressing work of art.

Donald Trump as da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi

The question on the table: Why?

But since we don’t know the answer to that question, we’ll answer another one: How come so many people have so much money?

Made in the Middle

The latest GOP “tax reform” proposals raise questions, too.

Though billed as a “middle-class tax cut,” the middle class gets almost nothing from the proposed plan.

Instead, almost all the benefits go to: (1) business owners, and (2) the rich.

And since the feds are unwilling to cut spending, the middle class ends up with about $2.2 trillion of extra debt, which it will have to reckon with eventually.

We bring up the tax cut because we think it helps explain the painting. Not for nothing are Republicans and the modern Salvator Himself, Donald J. Trump, setting up the middle class for a huge bamboozle.

A train ride we took on Monday – the Acela Express from Baltimore to New York – was subsidized by taxpayers from all over the country.

The train runs from one end of today’s modern economy to the other. It goes from Washington, D.C. – the center of politics – to New York – the center of money.

In between is nothing but poverty and dereliction. There are factories that last made a product in the ’50s. There are workers’ houses almost unchanged in half a century. There are abandoned warehouses… wrecked cars… junk steel… and burly men in orange vests working with machines.

The middle is where real work was done and real things were made, shipped, and distributed; it shows few signs of growth or prosperity.

It is as though a sausage had been squeezed in the middle, driving the rich meat to the ends. In between is lean… and greasy.

How come?

Deep State’s Fingerprints

Every crime scene has many fingerprints on it.

Most are of the innocent.

An aging population, for example, is not exactly something you can do anything about. Technological innovations, too, are largely beyond public policy control.

But there’s one set of fingerprints on the tax cut flimflam… the relative poverty along the Northeast Corridor… and the $450 million painting: the Deep State’s.

The insiders use fake money – the post-1971 dollar – to transfer wealth and power from the people who earn it to themselves.

It is as though they loaded up the train in Newark and Trenton… and shipped everything to Washington.

You earn real money by making real things and providing real services. But fake money is different. You don’t earn it by adding to the world’s wealth.

You get it by subtracting from it… that is, by borrowing from future output.

Real money is not controlled by anyone.

It is earned – freely – in win-win exchanges. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, it ended up in places like East Baltimore and Trenton because they used to make things people wanted.

But fake money takes a different route. It is created by the insiders… and controlled by them. It goes where they want it to go.

No Stimulus

Money always bows to politics; often, it is completely beholden to it.

In Russia, the oligarchs took government-owned property and used it to build their fortunes. In China, state-owned enterprises and favored entrepreneurs get government-backed credit to build their apartments, factories, and shopping malls.

And in America, the fake money is directed to favored sectors by 73,000 pages of the Internal Revenue Code… and 81,000 pages of the Federal Register.

So, it is hardly a surprise that the latest tax proposals favor the Deep State at the expense of the middle class.

Readers may argue that the money “stimulates” the economy… and that it “trickles down” to the common people. If so, there is little evidence of it.

As a percentage of the working-age population, fewer people have jobs today than at any time since the 1970s. Back then, the typical man had to work 900 hours to earn enough to buy a new pickup truck. Today, he has to work 1,500 hours.

Central banks have increased the world’s monetary base (and their own balance sheets) by $20 trillion so far this century.

This money didn’t go to the fellow in the orange vest. Instead, it went to Russian tycoons… Chinese billionaires… art collectors… hedge fund managers… and rich people on both ends of the track.

*  *  *

The Trump team reached out to Bill’s network for advice on the economy. Recently, Bill’s team sent them a field memo on a coming crisis… They’re now releasing it to the general public… (It’s not what you expect.) Click here to read more.

Nano-Cap Stock Of The Day - Why Is This China Construction Company Up 300% Today?

Yesterday, it was CHF Solutions - a $10 million market cap medical device-maker - that exploded 500% higher on no news, no catalyst, no event. Today it is the turn of China Advanced Construction...

China Advanced Construction Materials Group, Inc. produces construction materials for large-scale commercial, residential, and infrastructure developments. The Company is focused on ready-mix concrete materials.

The $14.8 million market cap company is now up 300% on 4 million shares traded...

 

CADC traded over $100 in Oct 2009...

 

Notably, the machines can"t get enough of CHF Solutions again today - up 20% back to yesterday"s highs...

Caveat fucking emptor!

Thousands Of Americans Scream At The Sky To Mark Trump Anniversary

It was the scream which, at the conclusion of Donald Trump"s inauguration ceremony, captured the existential dread of millions of Americans.

It also appears to have sparked a mass "resistance" protest movement.

On Wednesday night, thousands of Americans across the nation gathered to “Scream helplessly at the Sky on the Anniversary of the Election” to mark one year since President Trump"s victory.

Thousands attended events planned in New York City, Philadelphia, Dallas and other major cities. The idea came from Boston, where people will gather in America"s oldest park, the Boston Common, to scream. The premise behind the event was self-explanatory as people came to public gathering places, looked to the sky and, well, screamed.

This is how one Facebook event page described tonight"s event:

Let"s have a primal scream for the current state of our democracy! Gather together after work at Philadelphia"s City Hall, or just scream in solidarity from your own backyard.

The Washington Square Park event planned in New York was more emphatic:

Join us cucks and snowflakes, safe spacers and libtards, as we enjoy a collective cathartic yell into the heavens about our current political establishment.

Explaining the motive behind today"s screamfest, New York event organizer Nathan Wahl said that "frankly, I can’t keep up with it all. Every time I think of the laundry list of social injustices on top of my own shit like my actual laundry I get overwhelmed. Every news notification on my phone is a reminder of something over which I am powerless. And I think a lot of people feel that way. So fuck me for thinking it’d be nice to yell about it."

We really need some universal mental healthcare in this country and some anger management, while we’re at it. Which is kind of what this event is. It’s group anger management. No one’s crying. No one’s demanding anything. It’s a collective expression of frustration. It’s like… it’s like the feeling you have when you’ve been building Ikea furniture for three hours, and it’s late, and you feel like you’re getting nowhere, and you were almost done, but then you realized you put a piece on backwards and you have to take almost the entire thing apart and you just wanna fucking SCREAM. That’s what we’re doing?—?we’re screaming because living in America feels like building ikea furniture.

 

Secondly, I am doing something.

More than 15,000 people had expressed an interest in attending Wednesday’s scream in New York, including Joe Z. from Astoria, who told Metro it “might be helpful to bond with others who feel the same way.” Joe has found Trump’s presidency thus far “as awful as I feared — it’s a daily, sometimes hourly nightmare.” The main thing he intends to scream about is Trump’s measures against immigrants.

“Everything they do with immigration is about eliminating diversity from this country,” he said. “I live in Queens, diversity of cultures is what I most love about living here. There"s no empathy for others in the face of the most callous cruelty to other human beings.”

Tonight"s "scream" started off in a calm fashion as the following BuzzFeed clip shows...

People are gathering to scream at the sky in NYC to mark the one-year anniversary of Trump"s electionhttps://t.co/aU89B4HfzA

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 9, 2017

... before the occasional clashes broke out.

Crowd members are clashing while screaming at the sky in NYC on the anniversary of the 2016 electionhttps://t.co/aU89B4HfzA

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 9, 2017

Meanwhile, there was a parallel event for Trump supporters who wanted to shout their joy over the events of the past year. According to RallyList.com, there was a nationwide screaming counter-protest to “Praise God for President Trump” and that “HRC is not our president.”

Commuters & Computers: Mapping America"s Megaregions

From California’s Bay Area to the highly-integrated Great Lakes Economy, megaregions are a dominating aspect of human geography and commerce. It should be no surprise then, that 85% of corporate head offices in the US and Canada are overwhelmingly concentrated in the core cities of great megaregions.

We tend to think of cities as individual economic units, but as they expand outward and bleed together, defining them simply by official jurisdictions and borders becomes difficult. After all, as Visual Capitalist"s Nick Routley notes, many of the imaginary lines divvying up the country are remnants of decisions from centuries ago – and other county and state lines exist for more counterintuitive reasons such as gerrymandering.

What if there was a more data-driven approach to examine America’s urban networks?

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

COMPUTER, TAKE THE WHEEL

By ignoring borders and looking purely at commuter data, geographer Garrett Nelson and urban analyst Alasdair Rae looked to map the relationship between population centers in their paper, An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Mega-regions.

Researchers used visual and algorithmic approaches to build their map.

The study used network partitioning software to link together 4 million commutes between census tracts. This gives us a very granular look at the “gravitational pull” of America’s population centers, and helps us better understand the economic links that bind a region together.

By combining visual and mathematical approaches, and some creative place-naming, the researchers created a map that they hope reflects America’s true economic geography.

ALGORITHMIC INSIGHTS

The concept of megaregions is hardly new, and there are already definitions for global megacities that use everything from infrastructure systems to light patterns derived from satellite imagery.

That said, this research is fine example of using data and an algorithmic approach to look at systems in a new way, unburdened by our political and cultural preconceptions.

*  *  *

Interested in more infographics on human geography? There’s just a couple of days left to make the Visual Capitalist book a reality on Kickstarter.

'Killfie' Nation - India Dominates World's Selfie-Related Deaths

The trend of taking death-defying "killfies" is taking its toll in a Darwinian sense... on India!

The rise of smartphones and social media has paved the way for selfies to become a popular pastime for young people around the world, but as Statista"s Felix Richter notes, sometimes people hunting for the perfect self-portrait get carried away though and put themselves and sometimes others in harm’s way. Tragic as it is, researchers from the United States and India have found that taking selfies in dangerous situations cost at least 127 lives since March 2014.

The researchers scoured the web for news articles reporting selfie-related deaths in an effort to raise awareness and help prevent further injuries or deaths as a consequence of reckless selfie-taking. Ridiculous as it may sound, there are many ways to harm yourself while taking a selfie. The cases found by the researchers include several people falling from great heights, drowning or accidently shooting themselves while taking a selfie with a gun.

Photographers appear to be particularly careless in India where the researchers found the most reports of selfie-related accidents by far.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Art Bubble Pops As Sales Crash To Lowest Level Since 'Great Recession'

Just as Yellen & Co. has finally decided that "Everything is Awesome" and started raising interest rates (the timing of which we"re almost certain was in no way influenced by the conclusion of the recent election cycle), signs continue to mount that global economies are not as healthy as the Fed suddenly believes them to be.  In fact, over just the past couple of days we"ve highlighted a litany of negative economic data points including crashing bank loan creation, surging auto loan delinquencies and continuous deterioration of the retail sector, just to name a few.

And while the mega wealthy folks of the world are typically somewhat immune from the economic cycle, even they are suddenly taking a breather from purchases of multi-million dollar works of fine art which have collapsed to levels not recorded since 2009.  Per Bloomberg:

Sales of art and antiques dropped 11 percent to $56.6 billion, according to a report released on Wednesday by UBS Group AG and Art Basel. The decline, on top of a 7 percent slide in 2015, wipes out the gains seen in 2013 and 2014, when sales reached an all-time high of $68.2 billion.

“It was quite a challenging year for the art market,” Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics that prepared the report, said in a telephone interview.

Her outlook for 2017 is cautious, with sellers holding back as economic and geopolitical uncertainty continues in many countries. Buyers, on the other hand, may view art and antiques as “a relative safe haven amidst volatility elsewhere,” increasing prices for the works that appear on the market, according to the report.

This follows a note we published a few weeks ago noting that Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev had taken a 74% bath on a Paul Gauguin piece he purchased in 2008 for $85 million.

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev paid €54 million or $85 million for a landscape by Paul Gauguin in a private transaction in June 2008. Yesterday, he incurred a whopping 74% loss on his store of value "investment" as reported by Bloomberg:

Gauguin’s 1892 landscape “Te Fare (La Maison)" fetched 20.3 million pounds ($25 million), including commission, at Tuesday evening’s sale of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s in London. Rybolovlev will net about $22 million based on the hammer price. The auction house had estimated the value at $15 million to $22.4 million. The buyer was a client of Rebecca Wei, president of Christie’s Asia.

The Gauguin was one of four Rybolovlev pieces offered for sale on Tuesday. Another work, a Mark Rothko painting, will be auctioned March 7.

Of course, not all fine art is created equal...here were the biggest losers of 2016:

• Auction sales declined 26 percent to $22.1 billion, according to the report, released to coincide with the opening of Art Basel Hong Kong.


• Sales of postwar and contemporary works at auction fell 18 percent to $5.6 billion; modern art was down 43 percent at $2.6 billion; the Impressionist category declined 31 percent to $1.3 billion.


• The high end of the auction market -- where prices for artworks exceed $1 million -- fell 34 percent. Trophies priced at more than $10 million saw the biggest decline, at 53 percent.


• Industry leaders Sotheby’s and Christie’s lost market share, together accounting for 38 percent of the auction sales, down from 42 percent in 2015.

Liberal Protesters Boost Trump's Economy As Sign-Making Supplies Sales Soar 30%

In an ironic twist, the Trump-hating protesters of America (71% of which believe an economy-wide downturn is imminent) have boosted American growth since the inauguration - sales of poster boards, markers and other sign-making supplies jumped more than 30%.

Bloomberg reports that, according to data from the NPD Group which tracks sales of consumer goods, in the week of the inauguration alone, Americans spent an estimated $6 million on supplies - not insignificant considering that many of the individual items cost $1 or less.

Sales of foam boards rose 42 percent. Poster board sales grew 33 percent, and in the week before the inauguration, stores sold roughly one-third of the 6.8 million poster boards sold in January. Paint markers and fabric paint for t-shirts also sold more briskly than normal, said Leen Nsouli, director of industry analysis for office suppliers at NPD.

The sale jump was an unexpected boon to office supply retailers, which had seen sales drop for 22 weeks with the exception of the week before Christmas, and the two weeks before the march.

"You were seeing people use more traditional methods to express their thoughts, which was something that we hadn’t seen as much,” said Nsouli. In the past, “everything was always on the computer, on the phone. This was a really cool way to see it on paper, in pencil.”

With more demonstrations planned for the future, retailers might want to stock up, Nsouli said—and protesters should plan ahead.

First world problems - poster board shortages...

Better than running out of toilet paper, soap, and bread?

Whatever it takes to "Make America Great Again" - we wonder if all those sign-making supplies were "made in America" too?