Blog
Behind the numbers
Notes on the data this site runs on — where it comes from, what it can prove, and where it falls short.
Latest
How representative are country rankings?
The honest limits of ranking countries against US states: comparability grades, the measures we hide, data vintages, and what a median rank does and doesn't mean.
- 5 min readSourcesEconomics
How reliable is World Bank data?
A dozen of our measures lean on the World Bank. What its numbers are good for, how often they get revised, and why PPP comparisons deserve a health warning.
- 5 min readSourcesHealth
WHO, UNODC, and the problem of counting deaths
Police statistics and death certificates count the same tragedies differently. Why we rank homicide, suicide and overdoses on vital registration — not crime reports.
- 5 min readSourcesUS data
Census, BEA, CDC, BLS: why US state data is unusually good
Ranking a country among US states only works because four federal agencies publish state-level numbers most countries can't match nationally — including price-adjusted GDP.
- 4 min readMethodologySources
Pinned snapshots: when we deliberately don't auto-refresh
Most of our data updates weekly by robot. Some datasets are frozen on purpose — PISA, the Yale environmental index, gun deaths and more — and reviewed by hand.
- 3 min readData gapsComparability
Why the UK has no incarceration number
A short story about a deliberate blank: the UN reports prisoners for England & Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland separately — and we won't invent a UK total.
