A simple bar chart comparing the number of wars with the approximate world population from the 10th century to the 21st century.
The purple bars represent the number of wars, while the blue bars show the estimated world population in billions.
This provides a visual comparison of how conflicts and population trends evolved over time.
I would like any suggestions on how to make this more visually compelling. Thank you.
Posted by thefragileabsolute
10 comments
Gotta do wars per year. We not even 1/4 of the way through the 21st century, total number of wars isn’t helpful.
Bro are you telling me the earth is overpopulated because of the lack of war? 😭
What are you classifying as a “war”? Declared wars? Revolts?
I’d personally be more interested in war casualties vs world pop. but know the data isn’t there for that.
I don’t think “number of wars” is that useful since a war can be anything from a skirmish of a few dozen people to World War 2. Maybe “number killed in war” would give a better picture.
Yeah the second chart is mislabeled. As far as I know, we haven’t reached the year 2100 yet 😉
Also it may be worth describing what exactly was counted as a “war”. Maybe expand the description to be something like “Wars (lasting longer than a week or w/ 10000+ killed)” or whatever.
What are you trying to see in this data though? It looks like the only correllation that can be made is that more people = more wars. In order to have something interesting to say, I think you’ll need one more variable.
The x-axis captioning is incorrect. The twenty-first century is not the 2100s.
The world population changed substantially during the last couple of hundred years. Heck, it’s increased by a couple of billion in the last quarter century. How do you account for this?
How are you counting “wars”? Was the War of 1812 its own war, or a subsidiary conflict of the Napoleonic Wars? Ditto the Second Sino-Japanese War vis-a-vis World War 2. Ditto the Breton War of Succession vis-a-vis the Hundred Years War. And countless others.
The world population in the year 2000 was 6 billion.
There’s no way you can include “21st century” in this plot. The metric you plotted for 21st column (e.g. “number of wars in the first quarter” or “population by the end of the first quarter”) is different from the metric you plotted for every other column.
Also, “number of wars” is so slippery a metric I don’t think you’ll ever succeed with it.
I suggest you read “The Better Angels of our Nature” by Stephen Gould. In this book he does a numerical assessment of the likelihood that a given person will die through violence, starting many millennia ago. This is a brilliant metric because (1) it is meaningful back even before war was called “war” and was just “fighting the next village over”, (2) it is meaningful for long-running conflicts, (3) there is archeological data that lets you reconstruct the data far back before there were historical accounts of wars, (4) it self-adjusts for the severity and widespreadness of war, (5) it puts war into context with all the other violences.
“Number of wars” is an idiotic metric. It’s more semantic than measuring anything useful. Delete this post and come back with something worth anyone’s time.
When’s the population figure taken? The start of the century? The average of the century? It doesn’t really matter for the 10th-19th, but there was quite a lot of growth during the 20th