December 10, 2010

World's Billionaires Visualization

I always wanted to be RICH (just like everyone else) :)
There are 1101 Billionaires in the World in the year 2010 as released by Forbes Magazine. Now, I have the data and some interesting patterns can be deciphered. Some visualizations from the data set.

Spread of Billionaires across Age Groups:




Spread of Billionaires across Countries would be a usual visualization. So here is a quick heatmap of the same. I used openheatmap to create this - i would have ideally preferred that i am able to choose the colors so that the gradients are more pronounced and show the spread (but alas!). You can also interact with this map in here.




The Forbes list also gives the details of the Citizenship and the Residence of the Billionaires. This data can be used to find out the pattern here; i.e, find out the billionaires whos Country of Citizenship is not the same as Country of Residence; or try to find out how the countries of Residence and Citizenship correlate; which is the thickest arc in the data which links two countries? (though i would have preferred that clicking on the arc leads shows some useful tooltip, but i was not able to find that option in Protovis).



Also, some interesting facts came out of the data:
  • There are 8 'couples' - as in, set of 2 persons whose combined assets touch 1billion or more.
  • Of the 1101 names, there are 105Families; the total asset value of these 105 Families is 2990.4 Billion $. Top 3 countries having the rich families : US(25), China (9), India (7).
  • The combined wealth of all the Billionaires is close to 3567.8 Billion $.
  • Top 5 Countries measured in terms of the highest net worth of the Billionaires: USA(1349.3), Russia(265), India (222.1), Germany(217.7), China(133.2). (Again, this data can be showed as a heat/choropleth map, but i did not want to overdo on this viz). 
  • One more interesting observation would be to find out how age and the wealth work together. So, i quickly divided age by wealth to find out the most 'successful' - 'Success' here is defined as those whose age/wealth factor is as close to 1. And i found that top 5 on this race are :
  1.    William Gates III (Rank:2, Age:54, Worth:53, Success Factor:1.0)
  2.    Carlos Slim Helu & family (Rank:1, Age:70, Worth:53.5, Success Factor:1.3)
  3.    Warren Buffett (Rank:3, Age:79, Worth:47, Success Factor:1.7)
  4.    Mukesh Ambani (Rank:4, Age:52, Worth:29, Success Factor:1.8)
  5.    Eike Batista (Rank:8, Age:53, Worth:27, Success Factor:2.0)

The following visualization was more of a fun factor. It shows the tag cloud of the names of all the Billionaires in the world. The font size shows how frequent some of those names occur.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

pretty cool! have you seen http://givingpledge.org/ ? it's been making the rounds and more and more billionaires are signing up (53 at last count?). might be interesting to flavor some of your data with who's the most philanthropic, as measured from the giving pledge or by some other metric.

Venkat said...

I dont see the amount specified in the pledges; however, this can be included as part of the viz. Would also show us what % is being pledged. Details into where exactly the pledged amount is being(sector distribution) used would also be great.