Category Archives: Graphics

ThisIsIndexed.com: Graphs + Humor

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Graphics tell a lot story in a short amount of space.  It’s descriptive without being prescriptive.  For some fun examples look at http://thisisindexed.com/.  It’s a blog that Jessica Hagy has diligently been posting since 2006.  She hand-draws simple graphics that provide a lot of humor, and a surprising amount of truth.  She also blogs for Forbes here.

Venn diagrams are basic and boring.  It simply shows the overlap of two sets.  It’s not the most persuasive or interest graphic, and yet, look how much these pictures say.  These were all drawn in August 2006.  You can click on the pictures for the backlinks.

ConsultantsMind Consulting - Indexed Venn Diagrams

Keepin’ It Real

ConsultantsMind Consulting - Venn Diagram Indexed

Maybe Later

ConsultantsMind Consulting - Venn Diagram Indexed

Animal Farm

ConsultantsMind Consulting - Venn Diagram Indexed

How the Green Lawn, and Yet, the Sadness

ConsultantsMind Consulting - Venn Diagram Indexed

Perception as Diagnosis

Infographics: Telling Stories with Data

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Visual.ly is a website that showcases thousands of infographics where data is displayed in unique and fun ways.  For consultants who are in the business of telling stories with data, it is worth a few minutes of your time.

Visual.ly - ScreenshotConsulting presentations are simpler.  90%+ of presentations will be on PowerPoint and only use simple graphs with very straight-forward messages.  It’s a good thing because executives look for compelling recommendations, not cutesy graphics.

Infographics - Simple graphs in Powerpoint

As I noted in another post, McKinsey & Company printed their client presentations in black and white prior to 2009.  For them, the strength was in the analysis and clarity of argument.  If “simple” is good enough for McKinsey, it is good enough for you and me.

So why bother? A cynic might ask, “So why should a consultant even bother looking at infographics, if they are not the type of graphics we use with clients?”

Answer: It’s good for you.  It’s easy for us to get set in your ways.  We need to feed our minds new ideas and new ways to improve our craft.  It’s instructive to see how professional graphic designers represent data – even if you apply it later in a more toned-down or straight-laced way.

1. Learn to build an argument.   In Osama vs. Air Travel: The Post 9-11 Effect on Travel, see how the designer combined data to show the impact of 9/11 on US travel patterns.

Infographics - Airline Bankruptcies

2. See how others analyze data.  You can take the most mundane data and do amazing things with it.  Look at this analysis of the Songs that Metallica Played on Stage during 1982-2012.  It’s amazing to see how many ways they sliced the 30 years of data.

Infographics - Metallica Songs Play on Stage

3. See good (yet crass) examples of consulting tools.  Many of the infographics use classic consulting tools like fishbone diagrams, venn diagrams, pie charts, waterfalls.  See this Taxonomy of Sh*t which is just an affinity diagram.    Albeit, a vulgar one.

Infographics - Taxonomy of Sht4. Learn from bad examples.  There are examples where the designers goes overboard and makes the data confusing.  In Texting While Driving, you can see a muti-layered pie chart that takes about 30 seconds to fully decipher.   Do not do this.

The main point is simple – that young people text while driving – but the graphic is unnecessarily ornate and confusing.   Also, it is bad graphics hygiene because the age groups are unequal: 16-19 (4 yrs), 20-24 (4 yrs), 25-34 (10 yrs), 35-44 (10 yrs)?

Infographics - Texting While Driving

5. Enjoy the creativity.  Live a little and enjoy the creativity.  Face it, data analysis, pivot tables, MiniTab, and Powerpoint can get boring.   Check out the How Much You Can Trust a Bearded Man? and see if you agree with their analysis.

Infographics - Trustworthiness of Beards

Another savant analyzed the color palette of 10 artists over the same 10 year period.   I swear, there are some creative people out there.  More right-brained than I am.

Visual.ly - 10 artists over 10 years

Let me know when you find great infographics, I will add it below.

Misleading Graph #1: Starbucks Investor Presentation

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Charts can mislead.  In most cases, it’s accidental.  Perhaps someone was over-eager to show good results, or maybe, just did a sloppy job of formatting.  Whatever the cause, it’s bad mojo to put together analyses or charts that mislead.  Here are some bad examples  from Starbucks’ recently investor conference.  You can see all the slides here:

#1.  No axis label.  This is no-no.  A chart without a labeled X&Y axis is like a car without an odometer.  Not a good idea.

Bad graph - no axis

#2. Not drawn to scale.  Below, you can see that Starbucks is comparing its revenue with operating income.   Since the scale is different, the operating income actually looks bigger than revenue.  That ain’t right.

Bad graph - Not drawn to scale3. False or unnecessary comparisons.  Same problem below.  The coffee executives compare US & Canada & Latin America but use different – seemingly random – scales.

The 2012 revenues are shown with red dotted lines.  When you line them up, they look similar in size – when in reality – it should look like the graph at the bottom right.  The US is where the current revenues come from and Latin America is a rounding error.

Bad graph - inaccurate comparisons

Why make the comparison?  There was no reason to compare the US, Canada and Latin America.  They are at different stages of their growth.  Why force the comparison?

Comparing the US and Canada makes sense.  They are both mature markets with similar GDP per headcount and analogous cultures.  Taking the population for the US and Canada here, you can see that the average American and Canadian spends about the same on Starbucks annually.

Starbucks per AmericanAnalyze Latin America by itself or against other emerging markets.  Looking at Latin America over the last 3 years, looks like they went from $76M to $115M to $143M.  Nothing shabby about that.  Why not focus on that story separately.

Clarity is your job.  At the core, a consultant’s job is to drive clarity – through the data, analysis, and presentation.  Anything you do to over-simplify, obfuscate, or muddle the issue is bad.  The client can be confused by themselves – without paying your fees.

What is the fiscal cliff? Painful, but a much-needed financial diet

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Fiscal Cliff - Wile E CoyoteWhat is the fiscal cliff?  This term has become a popular way to describe the abrupt changes expected in the beginning of 2013 due to the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts, and the mandatory cut of several areas of government spending.  The NY Times does a great job explaining it here.

The US has been a deficit spender for the last 200 years.  Lots of drama right now about the fiscal cliff, but oddly, debt is not a new story for the US.  The graph below from the US GAO shows that the federal debt spiked during WWII, and has been in a range between 30-60% of GDP for the last fifty years.  Sad, but true.Fiscal Cliff - US Federal Debt Trend - Graph

Leverage can be good . . . As you learn in finance, debt can be a good  (and often cheap) way to fund growth.  It is all about what the money is used for.  If you are getting a good return on investment – productivity or growth – good for you.

. . . or it can be very bad.  Debt becomes a monster when you start getting a lower (or even negative) return on your money. That is what happened to the global economy over the last few years as growth slowed and everyone just kept borrowing.

The fiscal cliff is a symptom, not the root cause. David Wessel, Wall Street Journal economics editor, explains the main factors of the US budget in this short video.  He makes this consultant proud by boiling it down to 5 main points:

  1. Fiscal Cliff - 63% of spending on autopilotMost spending (63%) is on auto-pilot.  The majority of the spending is for promises that were already made in the past (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Subsidies, Interest on the debt).  Congress debates the remaining 37%
  2. 1 out of every 4 dollars goes to healthcare spending.  Costs continue to rise
  3. The US government employs 4 million people, but wages only make up $435 billion, even if you fired everyone, it would only reduce the deficit by 1/3
  4. 1 out of every 4 dollars goes to defense ($700 billion in 2011).  This is more than the defense budgets of the next 17 countries together
  5. The US borrows 36cents for every dollar we spend, much of it from overseas

Fiscal Cliff - Defense 700 billion

Debt reduction is good.  Actually, I am a huge fan of the US government becoming more solvent, improving its credit rating, and generally spending less than it makes.  If you and I can be frugal, then so can our government. The only concern is that it is too much belt-tightening during a fragile part of the recovery.  It’s as if we know we need to go on a financial diet, we just don’t want to start now.

US debt clock.  If you really want to scare yourself, look at this real-time clock here that counts different types of federal and state debt.  It makes the fiscal cliff look small.

US Debt Clock - Fiscal Cliff

Source: Wile-E-Coyote cartoon, AJC blog

Post-script: Aptly titled HBR blog The Fiscal Cliff is Just a Long-Overdue Hangover

College football: Multibillion industry with great margins

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College football industryJust watched the Alabama-Georgia game.  For international readers, this was the equivalent of  the semi-finals for college football between two rival teams who both had a winning season so far (11wins-1loss).  It was a very close game which Alabama won (32-28).

College football is huge business.  It generates enormous money for the universities.  Forbes magazine listed the most valuable teams based on enterprise value, revenues, and profits.  Typically, revenues come from ticket sales, alumni donations tied to club seats, corporate sponsorship, licensing, and television distribution rights. I am not convinced on how they calculated profits, so I only show revenues.

The top 10 teams generated revenues of $742 million in 2011.  The University of Texas was the clear leader with $96 million in revenues; they received corporate sponsorship from Coca-cola, Gatorade, and have their own cable channel in conjunction with Disney’s ESPN called the Longhorn Network.

College football industry team revenues - tableCollege football is more profitable than Microsoft or Google.  Forbes estimated the profits of each team in the same survey.   For the top 20 teams, the average profitability was about 63%, which means that 63cents out of every dollar was net profit.  Crazy.  To me, this seemed outlandishly high.  After all, college football cannot be 3x more profitable than Microsoft (MSFT net margins of 21%), or can it?

Forbes does great work, but I can only assume that they did not factor in all the fixed costs that might be shared by the university (e.g., depreciation of the stadiums, training facilities, etc).  As an alumnus of one of these top 20 revenue-generating football teams, it makes me pause to think that the university is largely funded by the football team.

Should college athletes be paid?  There has been a long-running debate among sports lovers on whether college athletes should be paid.  Currently, they are not compensated for playing sports (other than their year-to-year scholarships).  I am not a huge sports fans, but there is not shortage of polemics on this topic; you can find well-argued points supporting both sides of the debate: New York Times, Sports Illustrated, ESPN.

Economists would say something needs to change. Whatever the solution, some changes are needed.  It is no surprise that the richest football teams (e.g., Penn State, Alabama, Texas, Southern California, Auburn, Georgia, Ohio, Florida etc) also had football-related scandals recently.  You cannot have an multi-billion dollar industry where the main assets are people who cannot be officially paid.  It is a powder keg waiting to explode.   Eventually, there will be too much at stake and people will rationalize cheating.  We are not setting up people for success.

Coaches are paid.  Unlike the players, coaches can be paid.  USA Today put together this database of football head coach salaries here.  As a bit of a libertarian, people should be paid for their work and it is a free market for labor.  If you can get this kind of pay, good for you.   Even so, take a look at these numbers and you will find them a bit surprising, even by American executive pay standards.

College football industry coach salary - tableCoach pay is not equal.  Nor should it be.  I believe that good coaches make a difference, just like good leaders make a different in organizations.  Good ones should be paid more.  Here is the graph that shows how football head coach salaries drop off by 50% around the 20th team, then drops off another 50% by the 60th team.  The pauper in this list of salaries is for the head coach of Louisiana-Monroe.  Don’t feel sorry for him though, $250K is not bad.

College football industry coach salary - graph

Post script: How Can a New College Football Coach Avoid Getting Fired, Freakonomics

Where America leads: #1 in military spending and #1 in arms exports

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America has been the predominant military power for the last fifty years.  With the break up of the USSR in the late1980s, the US stands alone in its military spending.  Americans of my Gen-X generation, are now asking the question, “Should America Serve as the World’s Policeman?” and more cynically, “Can We Afford It?”

Clearly, the world is still a violent and messy place.  It is still a realpolitik world where geopolitical power is sadly demonstrated (as Mao so in-eloquently stated ) “from the barrel of a gun”.  There are too many failed economies, unconscionable despots, and tribal conflicts to leave people to their devices.  Unfortunately, we are a far cry from the world envisioned by Woodrow Wilson.  In many ways, the UN plays only a supporting role.

The United States has the highest military expenditures.  The US spends ~ 4.8% of GDP or $700 billion on the military annually.  To put that in perspective:

  • Since there are about 315 million Americans currently, this equates to each of us paying about $2,300 annually in military spending
  • Since there are about 7 billion people in the world, this means Americans pay about $100 annually in military expenditure for each global citizen
  • In the graph from the Economist, you can see that the US military spend is the same as the next 17 countries combined

Military Spenders GraphUnsurprisingly, China has the most soldiers. China has almost 2.3 million soldiers, which is 10x more than the Japanese.  In terms of Naval power (shown in the dark blue bars), the US, China and Russia are the only real contenders.  China recently acquired and retrofitted an aircraft carrier, but the NY Times notes here that it is only for training purposes and actually has no planes that can land on the vessel.  North Korea is also an outlier (as it often is) because it has 49 military personnel for every 1,000 people.  So sad.

Military by Country Graph

Military Industrial Complex.  President Eisenhower saw it coming 50 years ago.  He warned that a Military Industrial Complex would create an environment where the government, armed forces, and private companies share a mutual interest in maintaining a permanent military infrastructure.  Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address:

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.   We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.  We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Global arms trade is big business.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), arms exports have been approximately $20-30 billion annually for the last twenty years, as shown in the graph below.   It hit a low in the 2002-2003 time frame, and now it is at a high.  SIPRI has a lot of country-level data here for download.

Arms Exports Graph

The US and Russia (ex Cold War players) are exporting the most.   Seems like the military industrial complex in both countries still have a lot of arms to sell to the rest of the world.  The US sells a lot to South Korea and Australia, while Russia sells a lot to India and China.  Interestingly, the Greeks buy a lot of arms from the Germans and the French.

Arms Exporters GraphSo, what should role of America’s military be?   In a fascinating debate on the topic of “America Should be the World’s Policeman”, six experts discussed the pros / cons of an activist US foreign policy here.  Some might consider this a politically-charged topic, and it is.  It deserves discussion.  The safety of 1.5+ million American military personnel and $700 billion in annual US military spending hinge on the outcome of the national debate.

PS: Economist article on when China may outspend the US in military spending here.

Consultant’s View on Romney’s Comment: 47% of Americans Don’t Pay Income Tax

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Taxes are a universal complaint regardless of where you live.  It is the stuff of bar conversations, news reports and Presidential debates.  It is mentioned in the bible and let’s not forget that one of the twelve disciples was a tax collector (Matthew).

Is it true 47% of Americans don’t pay income taxes?  After Mitt Romney’s comment that almost half of Americans do not pay income tax, the Economist published this helpful table to give some context.  Of the 47% of Americans who do not pay income tax. . .

  • 28% of them do pay payroll taxes (even if they don’t pay income taxes)
  • 10% are elderly
  • 7% have income of less than $20K
  • The % of Americans not paying income taxes has increased from 15% in 1985 to almost 50% currently during by Democratic and Republic administrations

47% Not Paying Income Tax

Are US taxes high compared to other countries?  As an American who recently filed his taxes (yes, I got the extension to August), I don’t like paying taxes; Don’t feel like I am getting my money’s worth – but that is a different discussion.

Looking at this Economist comparison of the effective tax rates paid by people earning the equivalent of $100K annually in different countries, the US has one of the lowest rates. . .

  • Belgium, Greece, Germany, and France have the highest effective tax rates
  • India and Brazil (both developing countries) also have high rates
  • Of the 16 countries shown, only Russia and the UAE had lower rates

Global Tax Rates

Are the wealthy in the US paying their fair share?  In his Wall Street Journal article, David Wessels provided a lot of the data for readers to make up their own mind.  In an interview, he noted that “fair share” is a completely subjective assessment.  After looking at these four charts, what do you think? .

  • #1: The top 5% have increased their share of wealth, but also increased the amount of taxes they pay.  They earn 25% of the wealth, and pay 40% of the federal taxes
  • #2: The bottom 40% earn a smaller portion of the pie, but also pay dramatically less (%) in federal taxes.  Almost nothing
  • #3: Most Americans pay less in fed taxes than they did in the early 80s (Regan era)
  • #4: Inequality (rich getting richer, poor getting poorer) is rising, but government benefits and taxes are dampening those effects.  Somewhat progressive.

Who Pays TaxesDoes everyone hate the rich? As a bit of a libertarian at heart, I believe that those who add value in the market place deserve their success and wealth.  All Americans deserve equality in opportunity (education, legal protection, access to capital), but what you do with those blessings is completely up to you.  People should be given the same inputs, not guaranteed the same outputs.

  • From this survey, the Australians, Canadians, US and the Chinese seem to agree with me.  The rich deserve their wealth
  • Greeks, Russians, and Turks are most skeptical of the rich

Public opinion on the rich

With so many governments in debt and the increase in the numbers of pensioners, the notion of raising taxes is just as unpopular in the the UK, France, Greece or Germany. More than half of the readers of this blog are not from the US.  Please leave your comments.  Do these opinion poll results about the “rich” match your feelings?

Olympic trivia: live pigeon shooting, youngest athlete, theoretical limit to running, 100+ year gold medal count

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In the spirit of the Olympics, four graphs courtesy of the Economist blog.

1.The types of Olympic games have changed over the years.  The Olympics had 26 events in London, but that has not always been the case.  As recently as Beijing 2008, there were 28 events.  Well what are some of the events that went away?

  • Rope climbing seems like a simple and difficult sport.  Climbing a 20 or 25 foot rope with just your hands.  It appeared sporadically 4 times over 40 years
  • Live pigeon shooting in the 1900 Paris Olympics.  History.com notes that this went away after some spectators were horrified by the gore and cried
  • Tug-of-war existing between 1900 and 1920.  8 men on each side

Discontinued Olympic Sports

2. Olympians vary in age from 10 to 70 years old.  Seems like shooting and equestrian are good choices for the geriatric.  The younger athletes do better in swimming and gymnastics.  I guess we shouldn’t let 13 year-olds play with guns anyway.Oldest Olympic Athletes3. Olympians keep getting faster.  Dr. Mark Denny, from Stanford, has calculated the theoretical limit to how fast men and women can run (for the geeks: looking at the maximum standard deviation from the mean), and Olympians are rapidly approaching that limit.  That probably means that fewer records will be broken in the future.  Usain Bolt is crazy fast.

Fast Olympic Runner4. The US has done well at sports for 100 years.  In a different post, I showed that there are many ways to measure Olympic medals (e.g., medals per population, medals per GDP, medals per athlete).   That said, the most popular metric is the total number of gold medals.  Below, you can see who won the most gold by event over the last 100+ years

  • The US won the majority of golds in track/field (35%), diving (46%), swimming (50%)
  •  The Soviet Union won the majority of the golds in gymnastics (21%) and weight lifting (21%), and wrestling (16%).  Can you imagine if they kept winning after 1989?
  • Overall, the US has won 22% of the golds across all sports

Most Winning Country

Olympic Medals Measured by Population, By Productivity, By GDP

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As a consultant, it always seemed odd that news reporters routinely compare the medal count between the USA and China – after all, the USA has 530 athletes compared to China’s 380.  Seems like the total number of medals is only one of many potential metrics.  For example, productivity (i.e., # of athletes needed to win a medal) would be a metric that levels the playing field among countries of different sizes.  Thinking along those lines, I smashed together data of the last 40 years and came up with this:

If you’re from Iceland, there is a good chance you are an Olympic Athlete. . .

Most selective Olympic team

In 2010, there were 319K people in Iceland and yet they sent 27 people to London for the Olympics.  Simple math tells us that they sent 1 athlete for every 11K people.  In fact, it is really easy to be an Icelandic Olympic athlete compared to the Bangladeshi.

I took the country’s 2010 population here and divided it by the number of athletes that each country sent to the London Olympics.   You can see that China sent 1 athlete to the Olympics for every 3.5M citizens.  The US sends 1 athlete for every 580K citizens.  It is easier to go to the Olympics as an American than a Chinese – less selective.

Olympics by Population 1972-2008If you are from Bangladesh, your chances of going to the Olympics as an athlete are slim.  Only 1 in 30 million Bangladeshi go to compete in the Olympics.  As a thought-experiment, if all the teams sent 1 athlete for every 30M people . . .

  • The US Olympic team would only send 10 people (not 580)
  • The total Olympics would only be 233 Athletes (not the 10,700+ it currently is)
  • Only 40 countries (over 30M population) would be competing

The most productive Olympic athletes are from . . . . Panama

Athlete productivity

Why does data surprise us?  Looking at all the medals won in 2008, and then dividing it by the number of athletes sent to Beijing by country, Panama wins the prize for the most productive athletes.   Panama will win 1 medal (over average) for every 3 athletes they send to the Olympics.  It is correlation, not causality – but it is still impressive.

Olympics Medals

  • South Africa won 1 medal in 2008 with 136 athletes
  • Burkina Faso also won 1 medal in 2008, with only 6 athletes

Of all the medals that China wins, more than 50% are gold

Gold as a percentage of medals

In a previous post, I discovered that only 32% of medals are gold (more than 36% are bronze).  When analyzing the medals over the last 40 years, the Chinese have stood out as a strong bunch.  51% of their medals are gold vs. 32% of US medals being gold.

Olympic Gold %

In terms of the GDP per athlete, the Indonesia was the highest

GDP per Athlete flag

Looking at the country-based GDP numbers here, Indonesia has $32B in GDP (2010) for every athlete sent to London 2012.  By comparison, every Tuvalu athlete symbolizes only $10M in GDP output.  Likewise, the US Olympic athlete symbolizes $27B in output compared to $4B represented by the British athlete.

GDP per Athlete

China keeps winning. . .

Looking at the current medal leaders in London, you can see that the United States (in white) has been consistently winning ~ 100 medals every summer Olympics except in the 1980 Olympics where there was a boycott.   The British  (in blue) have done well since 2000, but the Chinese are the stand outs.  They had no Olympic team in 1980, yet they had 100 medals in 2008.

Summer Olympic Medals US China UK

I am a patriotic American.  Huge believer in US constitution, freedom of speech, Chik-Fil-A sandwiches, our top-shelf graduate education system, Pixar movies, micro-brews, Teddy Roosevelt, National parks and NPR.  (Yes, I do wish the Economist was a US paper).  Love watching the women’s soccer (not football) team beat the Japanese, and the women’s volleyball finals US vs. US.  Michael Phelps is impressive too.

That said, we also need to give credit where credit is due.  The Chinese have been rocking the Olympics.  A balanced scored card of the Olympics might look like this.

Scorecard US China UK

China won 100 medals in 2008 summer Olympics which was a 59% increase over 2004.  Each Chinese athlete has a 1 in 3.5 million chance of making the team, but when they get to the Olympics ~ it takes 6.4 athletes to win a medal, and 51% of the time it is gold.

The Olympics are awesome to watch and one of the most democratic sporting events, if you are willing to measure medal counts a little bit differently.  Enjoy the games.  Go USA.

Note: The Huffington Post has also done an excellent job with this line of thinking – alternate ways to count medals.  Look here.

A consultant’s view of 40 Years of Olympics Data (1972-2008)

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Olympic RingsThe Olympics are a wonder.  At a macro-level, it is a family get-together of 200+ nations where all the international relations and the geopolitical clatter is replaced with sports.  It’s a rare opportunity where xenophobia, racial stereotypes, and hatred are not accepted.  At an individual level, it is hundreds of individual stories of ambition, sacrifice, and passion.

The Olympics have been around for a long time and who does not like Olympic sports stats? Looking back over the last 10 summer Olympics, a few things you notice:

There is medal inflation. . . Forty years ago, there were  600 medals awarded at the summer Olympics.  In 2008, 951 medals were awarded.  This increase is largely because of the increase in the number of events from 21 (1972) to 28 (2008).  Apparently, 2012 London does not have baseball and softball, so the number drops to 26 sports, only to go back up to 28 in the next Olympics with the addition of Golf and Rugby.

40 years of Olympic Medals

. . but it’s still damn hard to get a medal.  Yes, the number of medals went up, but so did the numbers of athletes.  Over the last forty years there have been  ~ 7,700 medals awarded and approximately 85,500 athletes.  Using a simple average, that comes to about 9% of the athletes getting medals. For the math types, that 9% is approximate because some athletes win more than 1 medal (e.g., Micheal Phelps) and some events award medals to the entire team (e.g., 1 gold medal for football, but it goes to 11+ players).  On the graph below, you can see that the 1980 and 1984 Olympics were outliers because of cold-war related boycotts.  In 1980 and 1984, there were fewer athletes, so the chances of actually winning a medal increased dramatically.

% of Olympic Medals

Lots of bronze medals: I thought that there was 1 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze per event, but that is not what the data said.  After a friend explained why, now I know that some events like judo, taekwondo and wrestling have 2 bronzes medals.

Bronze Medals as a % of TotalMore countries are winning medals. . . In 2008, there were 86 counties that won at least 1 medal during the summer Olympics,  broader participation than ever.

Number of Countries Winning Medals. . . a lot of them are former Soviet Republics.  In 1992, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania win medals.  Then in 1996, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and others join in. Summer Medals from Former Soviet Republics

One commenter asked: What is the US vs. USSR medal counts (including Post-Soviet Republics)?

Well, it looks like the USSR & Post-Soviet Republics are really great competitors.  Their medal counts were higher than the US in 8 of the 8 years when there were not boycotts.

US vs USSR and Post Soviet

The 80/20 Rule applies: Over the last 40 years, 129 countries have won Olympic medals.  However, 23 of those countries have captured 80% of the cumulative medals.

Summer Olympics Medals Cumulative Total by CountryMighty East Germans: The East Germans’ Olympic medal count remains the 4th highest in the list of 129 countries with medals.  This struck me as particularly impressive since the Berlin wall fell in 1989.  They won all 384 medals between 1972-1988.East and West Germany Olympics

They New York Times does great work with visualization.  This bubble chart of Olympic Medals by countries is no exception.  You can see by screenshot how big the East German bubble is in 1988.  Click on the link and enjoy this graph with a slider on it.

Olympics Medals

Source: Olympic rings photo, Flickr, spcbrass