We’re going to get all manner of “decade in review” articles over the next few days. Most of them will try to pick out key moments or incidents; however, such focus on the sudden and spectacular misses the slower, but probably more important trends.
For instance, there were considerably more Australians at the end of the decade than at the start:
We got paid a fair bit more, too:
And, unlike some countries, most of us kept our jobs in the financial crisis:
Globally, of course, the biggest story of the decade was China’s progress towards restoring its historical share of world GDP (NB: the graph is fine, the linked commentary is in my view alarmist hyperbole):
Enough about money. There are other stories that can be told with a time series too; case in point, the environment. For instance, It didn’t rain a whole lot in southern Australia, notably in the Murray-Darling catchment:
And atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise:
What other time series have you seen that tell an important story of the last decade?
PC, early 21st Century style.
I heard “Dave Morrow” ranting about the decision to rest Mitch Johnson from the second test and relieve him from Shield commitments so he could work on his fitness and bowling action with Troy Cooley.
Morrow had a real spray, playing the common sense every man to cricket’s ivory tower boffins who were driven, in this matter if you can believe it, by political correctness.
Now this seemed initially mad to me, whatever one thought of the wisdom of the Mitch Johnson fitness/technique response. PC? WTF?
After reflection however, that claims of “PC” have morphed to encompass every instance where the wisdom of the authentic common man (a.k.a the common ranter) collides with the insights/conduct of people who apparently know stuff and have pertinent experience. This applies as much in cricket as in climate change, asylum seeking, matters of gender rights or anything else.
It may well be that this theme the wisdom of the authentic common man when it coincides with the predisposition of conservatives may well be the key “intellectual” fashion of this decade. To say this was PC, early 21st Century style might be too paradoxical.
Shouldn’t this review have been done at the end of 2009? After all, we all know that the new millenium started in 2000.
Errrr, didn’t it?
*giggles and runs away*
It’s a bit odd that the China graph marks the ascension of Deng Xiaoping, but not the actual 1949 Chinese Revolution–especially when the latter seems to have been the point where China’s proportional GDP started to turn around.
Fiona, I give you the article that prompted this post, where a decade is apparently 11 years in length.
Skip, my guess is that doesn’t correspond with the proclivities of the author of the post from whom I stole the graph, who appears to be one of these apocalyptic goldbugs.
Yes, no doubt.
Robert,
Curiously, the China GDP trend seems to be a straight line between 1950 and 2010. I suspect the author of the diagram did not bother with many data points.
Agreed. That said, I’m not sure how much stock one could realistically put in Chinese GDP data in the first few decades after the revolution.
That’s the most likely explanation, but…The Stalinist economic model did deliver high growth rates (starting from a low base, of course) right up into the 1960s. Hence Khruschev’s famous “we will bury you” boast. If Russia could grow despite the Ukrainian Famine and WWII then perhaps China could grow despite the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the disruption of the Cultural Revolution.
Immiseration, mass murder and even famine can coincide with rapid growth in GDP, if the rate of exploitation is high enough and the apparatus of terror sufficient to keep a lid on.
Robert, great idea for a post but hard to reply in comments with graphy goodness!
Nevertheless, here are some stats I found just tooling around:
Cost of Gigabyte of HDD data storage
—————–
2000 – US$19.73
2010 – US$00.08
Australian household data usage
—————-
2000 – 171Mb download, 97% of connected households used 56kpbs modems
2010 – 15Gb download @ 6.28Mbit/sec (global average 7.67 Mbit/sec)
Average smoking rate among Australian adults
—————–
2000 – 23%
2010 – 15%
Number of Homicides in Australia
—————–
2000 – 310 approx. 20% involving firearms
2010 – 250 approx (projected @ 19 Dec 2010) 15% involving firearms
Number of US-Australia Free Trade Agreements
—————–
2000 – 0
2010 – 1
Number of Starbucks stores in Australia
—————–
2000 – 84 approx.
2010 – 23
Most popular Christmas gift in USA (according to Esquire magazine)
————
2000 – Razor scooter
2010 – iPad
Biggest source of online music
————–
2000 – Napster
2010 – Apple
Online shopping share of Australian consumer spending
—————
2000 – <1%
2010 – 3%
Full RRP for flatscreen TV
————–
2000 – <$10,000
2010 – from $300
World's tallest human-habitable building
————–
2000 – Petronas Towers, Malaysia, 452m
2010 – Burj Khalifa, Dubai, 828m
Approximate distance of Voyager I space probe from sun
———-
2000 – 11.2 billion kilometres (beyond aphelion of Pluto)
2010 – 17.4 billion kilometres (beyond termination shock)
Most-sold mobile phone model in world (multi-year accumulated totals)
——————–
2000 – Nokia 3210 (150 million+ sold)
2010 – Nokia 1100 (200 million+ sold)
According to Wikipedia, Nokia's one billionth phone sold was a Nokia 1100 purchased in Nigeria.
Anyone got others??
Number of notable Australian movies made : 2000 = 6
2010 = 6 (From Wikipedia.
Number of Australian novels published:
2000 = 400
2007 = 300 (Source publishing industry do, PDF only goes up to 2007.
Someone described the late 20th century (post WW2) as the era of the emigre and I don’t think it has ended yet. The graphic pics of Christmas Island will keep it alive, though we could quibble over whether emigre is still the appropriate description. It may only be a forerunner of things to come. There may even be shades of the authentic common person in there somewhere.
The world’s fastest (publicly disclosed) computer is approximately 1000 times faster in 2010 than the fastest computer was in 2000, at least by the (rather simplistic, but still useful) LINPACK benchmark.
Incidentally, my new mobile phone is much, much faster than a Cray-1.