The World is Spiky

This article from The Atlantic Monthly's series "The World in Numbers" is a discussion of globalization by Richard Florida which is centered around four maps prepared by Tim Gulden. These maps use innovative three dimensional cartography to show how population, economic activity (proxied by light emissions), technological innovation (proxied by patent activity), and scientific progress (proxied by home institutions of highly cited scientists) are distributed across the surface of the earth.  Florida argues that the maps show that the drivers of progress are highly concentrated and that globalization is unlikely to reduce this concentration.  He presents this as evidence that uncontrolled globalization is likely to exacerbate rather than relieve global and regional inequality.

Richard Florida is Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University

Tim Gulden is a Research Fellow at CISSM