Decius wrote:

flynn23 wrote:
I'd like to see this same graphic overlaid with the murder rate for each sector. "Military" casualties excluded of course. Just capita murder rate. I would expect to see an interesting corollary.

Thats an interesting question. Below I'll post Wikipedia's GDP graph on the left and their murder graph on the right. I'm not sure there is a correlation. One suspects that poorer countries simply aren't able to collect good statistics. There seems to be a relationship between poverty and murders on these charts, but the obvious exception is the United States.

Excellent! I suspect there needs to be some normalization and of course there will be anomalies, but the reason why this even popped into my head was the comment about Brazil. It's a darling right now in the investment community and even the eco-green community, despite the fact that it practically leads the world in murder rate and is one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Maybe it's not current economic might, as the first graph was depicting, but change or growth in economic might. My suspicion is that as the economy grows faster, anything getting 'in the way' tends to be an easier choice to make.

RE: The Big Picture | How big IS the US anyway?