visualizing life expectancy vs wealth vs time

This is an excellent use of visualization to explain or analyse data.  It’s really a shame he didn’t play it more slowly and explain more of the data.

Video: Hans Rosling - 200 years in 4 minutes

Can you imagine how much harder it would be to see the trends in raw data?  Or to try and do a three dimensional graph for each country?  In general, I strongly suggest putting a little time into making data easy to interpret - I tend to notice more trends that way and it’s so much easier to explain graphical data.

My only concern about the video is that the income isn’t clear - are dollars normalized to 1800 dollars (accounting for inflation)?  Is there a stronger or weaker correlation if income is represented in terms of typical essentials (food, clothes)?