The Honshu Tsunami

Via Jeff Masters, an animation of the Japanese tsunami's propagation across the Pacific basin:



The abstract yet brute physicality of the phenomenon makes it all the more horrifying to think about the lives lost to this disaster.

Says Masters, "Today's quake was the strongest in Japanese history, and will likely be the most expensive natural disaster in world history, surpassing the $133+ billion dollar price tag from Hurricane Katrina." He also has a nice map of the force distribution of the tsunami across the Pacific. The irregularities are interesting, as they were for the (obviously far less destructive) tsunami spawned by the Chile earthquake a year ago. I cannot explain them, but I do suspect fractal patterns may be involved.

Wealth II

Here's more on wealth since 1500, from Visualizing Economics:



You can pretty clearly see that the story of the global economy from like 1750 to 1950 was really all about a redistribution of wealth from India and China to Western Europe and the US. Other regions of the world just didn't change that much one way or the other.

But it's also interesting how many trends have reversed themselves since ca. 1950. The dominance of the US and Western Europe has receded somewhat. Japan has about doubled its historical share of global wealth. China and India have halted their long slides (though they still have a long way to go to recoup their historical norms).

We'll check in in another 500 years and see how things are coming along.

UPDATE: I am told that - this being The Map Scroll rather than The Chart Scroll - good form demands that this post include a map. So, here is a moderately relevant map animation showing the changing map of Europe from 1519 CE to the present.

Yet More on Megaregions: Asia, This Time

Here's more from the Florida, et al. paper (PDF) on megaregions. This shows the megaregions of Asia. They are:

1) Tokyo, with 55 million people and $2.5 trillion in economic output: the world's largest megaregion.

2) Osaka-Nagoya, to the south of Greater Tokyo on Japan's largest island of Honshu. It has 36 million people, and contributes another $1.4 trillion to the global economy.

3) Fuku-Kyushu straddles the three mjor Japanese islands of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, and is home to another 18.5 million people.

4) Sapporo, the last of Japan's four megaregions - and it's smallest - is Sapporo, which covers much of the northern island of Hokkaido. (Note that the authors of the paper observe that the boundaries between Japan's four regions are themselves beginning to blur, and that they may be in the process of becoming an integrated "super-megaregion.")

5) Seoul-Busan covers most of the nation of South Korea; it's population is 46 million.

6) Singapore, the city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, is home to 6 million, a third of whom actually live across the border in Malaysia.

7) The megaregion around Bangkok has a population of 19 million, and an economic output of $100 billion.

8) The Hong-Zhen megaregion in Southeast China incorporates Hong Kong and the rapidly growing industrial cities of Guangdong province. It has a population of about 45 million.

9) Shanghai anchors a megaregion of 66 million people, though being entirely contained within an emerging economy, it produces only $130 billion in economic output (as of 2007).

10) Beijing anchors China's third megaregion, which is home to 43 million people. (The authors note that per capita economic output is fully 360% higher in these three megaregions thn it is in the rest of China.)

11) Delhi-Lahore is home to a whopping 121 million people: the largest megaregion by population in the world. (The authors also mention that Bangalore-Madras, with 72 million people, and Mumbai-Poona, with 62 million, are likely to become megaregions in the near future, though as yet they don't meet the criterion of having an economic output of at least $100 billion. Interestingly, the near-megaregions of India actually have a lower per cepita GDP than other areas in the country, in contrast to China's disproportionately wealthy megaregions.)

There are three further megaregions beyond those in North America, Europe and Asia. Mexico City, with a population of 45 million and an output of $290 billion, is the largest of these; Rio de Janeiro-Sau Paulo is home to 43 million; and the Middle Eastern conurbation formed by Tel Aviv, Israel, Amman, Jordan, and Beirut, Lebanon has a population of 31 million.

Together, the 40 megaregions of the world count for less than 18% of global population; yet they produce fully 2/3 of the world's economic activity. The authors make the compelling case that these megaregions - rather than cities or nations - provide the best level of economic and social analysis, and that this is the level at which economic development meaningfully occurs. In other words, the rise of the developing economies is not so much a story of the rise of China, India, Brazil, etc.; it's the story of the rise of Hong-Zhen, Delhi-Lahore, and Rio-Paulo. And it's the future of those megaregions which will define the future of the world.

UPDATE: And let's not forget Taipei: 21.8 million souls , all the way up and down the western side of the island of Taiwan.