A Good Day for Graphs

Seems like I've been seeing a lot of excellent graphs lately, so here are few of them on a range of topics.

The first two go together, though they're from different sources. The first shows the number of terrorism attacks on transportation modes throughout Europe over the past 45 years:


It's down, down, down... but you would never know that from media coverage. Not much comfort to anyone directly affected by the Brussels bombings, but for the rest of us... chill out.

The second shows the number of deaths and injuries from terrorism in Europe over the same timeframe:


Again, the number of deaths is very much down. Even the worst moments, like the Paris or Madrid bombings, are small spikes compared to much of the 1970s or '80s.

Then there's this set of bar graphs, showing what percentages of people born between 1957 and 1965 (my age cohort) have been incarcerated, based on their income decile and race/ethnicity (black, white, Latino).



Basically, the richest black kids had about the same chance of going to prison as the poorest white kids. Other facts to be seen: The white kids from the third-lowest decile were the most likely whites to go to prison; and consistently, the people from the lowest decile in all three groups were less likely to go to prison than their slightly better-off peers in the second-lowest decile. Rich white kids are more likely to go to prison than rich Latino kids. And the poorest black kids were hardly any more likely to go to prison than the almost-richest (80th and 90th decile) black kids.

That's the bad new. Here are the good-news graphs.

This one shows how child mortality has declined precipitously over the past 200 years and flattened out as well:



It's formatted in an unusual way. Time is only shown by each of the colors/lines, while mortality is the Y axis and the X axis is countries organized by share of the world population (which is a bit hard to grok). But basically, what I get from it is that in the year 1800, child mortality was high everywhere, and now it's comparatively low everywhere... but the way the transition from one level to the other happened was very uneven around the world. The in-between time point (1950-1960) shows some places with current levels of child mortality, while many others remained at almost-1800 levels.

And finally, this graph shows U.S. water use compared to our GDP:


Up until the 1970s, water use tracked GDP closely, but suddenly in the mid-1970s, it stopped doing that. Water use then stayed pretty flat for years, until it started heading down in the mid-2000s.