A simple graphic posted to Reddit recently shows that more than half of the world's total population resides within a circle drawn over Asia. For Matthew Yglesias, it "underscores the fundamental truth of 21st-century economics."
As Caitlin Dewey explains in The Washington Post, the above graphic, which was posted by Reddit user valeriepieris, covers 19 Asian countries in which 3,637,830,357, or roughly 51.4 percent of the global population resides.
For Yglesias, the graphic illustrates Asia's emergence after two centuries of Western-led growth. "We had an approximately 200-year span in which an enormous amount of economic growth and geopolitical influence were located in Western Europe and its colonies in North America, but it's still the case that people mostly live in Asia."
"So now that all the countries inside the circle are politically independent and only a handful of them are still governed by totally insane ideologies, we should expect most of the action to happen where most of the people are," he continues. "That means most of the manufacturing, but also most of the innovation and most of the popular culture. Both the producers and consumers of everything live over there."
Read the full story: Everybody Lives in Asia
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