The same money buys a longer life

AfricaAsiaEuropeLatin America & CaribbeanNorthern AmericaOceaniaoutlined: a stand-inthe middle, by income

Across: money per person, each step to the right doubling it ($1k is $1,000). Up: life expectancy at birth, in years. Every panel has the same scales.

How to read this: each square is one country; the bigger the square, the more people live there, and its colour is its continent (the key names each one). Where squares overlap the colour is stronger. The thick line, in the colour of this text, is the middle life expectancy of the countries at each level of income. Outlined squares are countries where nobody recorded how long people lived, so the number is a stand-in, not a measurement. The United Kingdom and India are ringed.

Read the panels in order and the whole cloud rises, not just slides to the right. Countries did get richer, but at every level of income people began to live longer. In 2018, the poorest countries ($500–$1,000 a person) lived 59.9 years in the middle, and the richest ($32,000–$64,000) 81.8: money still matters, and the gap is large.

The early panels are thin. In 1870 there are income figures for 65 countries, and for 48 of them no record of how long people lived. By 1913, 66 countries and 5 stand-ins. Nothing is filled in to make a panel look complete.

1913195019802018

How to read this: each group is the countries with the same money per person, in dollars of the same buying power. Each bar is how long people lived in the middle country of that group, in 1913, 1950, 1980 and 2018; the stronger the colour, the later the year. A longer bar is a longer life.

At the same money — $1,000 to $2,000 a person, among the poorest countries of every period — people lived 33.5 years in 1913 and 62.4 in 2018. In 2018, countries at that level lived longer than countries with four times as much money did in 1913 (52.2 years).

If money alone decided how long people live, the bars in each group would be the same length. They are not: at the same income, later years live longer. Something besides money lifted the whole curve — Preston pointed to vaccines, medicines, clean water and knowing how illness spreads, which reach poor countries as well as rich ones.

Not every bar is longer than the one before: which countries have a given income changes from one year to the next, and the middle value moves with them. The table gives how many countries each value is taken from.

In 2018 the richest country here, Qatar, produced $153,764 a person and its people lived 82.7 years on average. The poorest, the Central African Republic, produced $623 a person — 247 times less — and its people lived 52.3 years.

How to read this: money is per person in a year, in dollars of 2011 buying power; years are life expectancy at birth. A dash means no income figure for 1913; ≈ marks a stand-in life expectancy.

70 countries have no income figure in this record, so they are not drawn: American Samoa, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Curaçao, Eritrea, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Fiji, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Gibraltar, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guernsey, Guyana, Isle of Man, Jersey, Kiribati, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Macao, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mayotte, Micronesia, Monaco, Montserrat, Nauru, New Caledonia, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Réunion, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sint Maarten, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Sudan, Suriname, Timor-Leste, Tokelau, Tonga, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, US Virgin Islands, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Western Sahara.

• The curve ends in 2018. The historians' income per person, in the same dollars back to 1870, stops there. The World Bank's figures to 2024 in the sections above are dollars of another kind (2015 prices, converted at exchange rates), so they are drawn on their own and never joined to the curve.
• Before 1950, much of this is reconstruction. Historians rebuilt old incomes from wages, prices and harvests, and many old life expectancies are stand-ins. The stand-ins are outlined.
• Money per person is not a pay packet. It is everything a country produces in a year, divided by its people. It says nothing about who gets it.
• Together, not because. The picture shows that money and long lives go together. It does not show which causes which, and long, healthy lives also make countries richer. Preston's own reading — that most of the gain came from things other than income — is his argument, not something this picture proves.
• 70 countries are missing, mostly small islands; they are named above.
• Money from abroad is more than migrants' money. The World Bank's "personal remittances" also count the pay of people who work across a border and live at home.
• Prices and the Gini index come from each country's own statistics, gathered by the IMF and the World Bank. Surveys of spending and of earnings are mixed in the Gini index.

Method: income is Maddison's GDP per person in 2011 international dollars — dollars adjusted so that one buys the same everywhere and in every year. Life expectancy and the number of people are the UN's from 1950 and Gapminder's before. A life expectancy before 1950 that moved less than 0.05 years in the twenty years up to it is treated as a stand-in and outlined. The thick lines are the middle (median) life expectancy of the countries in each income band, each band double the one before, drawn only where at least three measured countries fall in it.

Method for the sections from 1960: output is the World Bank's GDP in dollars of 2015; per person is our own division by the UN's count of everyone alive in the middle of each year (the Bank's own figure, which uses another count, agrees to within 0.6%). Prices are the World Bank's consumer-price series, chained year by year from 2000; countries missing any year are left out. The Gini index is the World Bank's (Poverty and Inequality Platform), each country's newest survey since 2014. Money from abroad is the Bank's personal remittances received, newest year since 2022, in dollars of each year; per person divides by the UN's count. Every World Bank series was fetched with its licence record, and each says CC BY 4.0.

Sources: Maddison Project 2020 · UN WPP 2024 · Gapminder · World Bank · flag-icons. Every source, its licence and how to cite it →

Verified 2026-09-30 · 73 canaries