I wonder how the center of economic activity would compare to other measures. For instance:<p>- Center of all landmass<p>- Center of all arable land<p>- Center of population<p>- Center of population weighted by income<p>Especially if viewed over time, this would give a better sense of the meaning of this data.
This is interesting because I was thinking about a somewhat related sort of statistical measure (trying to determine average times over repeated measurements of a wall clock) and happened upon this: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_of_circular_quantities</a><p>I think this particular trend could benefit from some insights therein, they would help avoid the issue of hovering around the center of the 2d coordinate plane. If you use 3d coordinates on the sphere, your center of gravity will appear on the unit sphere and the radius can be used to determine how strongly it favors that particular area.<p>As an example of where this could add confusion, if you have a huge economy in the US and a huge economy in China, you basically are canceling out the values with the current axes, if you shifted them, it may change the plots dramatically with the purely 2d representation.
A lot of discussion about the "right" way to calculate a result, without discussing why.<p>My guess is something along the lines of an assumption that income is roughly equal to spending so you want "the" place on earth thats ideally suited to building your food processing plant or refrigerated warehouse to minimize total air shipping costs assuming everything will ship by air.<p>I'm not really sure what meaning this "center" has beyond that unless strange assumptions are made, like income is perfectly proportional to capital market size, or income is perfectly proportional to military power or something.<p>There is very fast alternative discrete rather than continuous method to calculate "a center" that scales very poorly as resolution increases (which doesn't matter because the input data is junk wrt sig figs and truth) which is just to make a giant mesh network of clusters of a discrete billion bucks at a certain lat/lon or whatever, then add an imaginary center that can move that optimizes itself to a minimum distance from all other existing points. You'll get into huge arguments about high enough res and metastability and rounding errors and local maxima/minima but you can ignore all that, given that as an engineering estimate the input data is junk, you just figure the total distance for each points at all whole degree intersections (88 W 43 N aka Chicago-ish, next 89 W 43 N, then 90 W 43 N ... ) so you figure 360*180 (actually more like 178 than 180, and a +2 for polar reasons) and then sort the 64000 or so results and pick the lowest.<p>Using the discrete method, if you figure there's 64K (16 bits) degree intersections on the globe and maybe 1024 (10 bits) or so clusters of a billion bucks, that is maybe 26 bits worth of distance calcs and additions, figure 3 bits per decimal digit for "less than 10 digits of operation" and we have multicore processors that run about that many ops per second (if you have the memory and IO bandwidth LOL, which you won't), that followed by a very modest sort, so this is quite tractable and has a resolution probably higher than the sig figs in the input data you're feeding it. No, it doesn't scale well to a higher resolution, and thats OK because the input data doesn't warrant it.<p>The whole topic smells of a really bad dotcom "brain twister" interview question for a CRUD app designer or CSS jockey. Back when that was how it was decided who was a good or bad one based on solving riddles and stuff.
I guess this is somehow related, world population by latitude and longitude, which you can use to of course derive center.<p><a href="http://blog.andersen.im/2013/05/interactive-map-of-world-population-by-point-latitude-and-longitude/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.andersen.im/2013/05/interactive-map-of-world-pop...</a>
It seems surprising that by the outbreak of WW1, the economic centre of gravity was hovering to the west of Greece. In other words, all of the European imperial powers scrambling over Africa and the New World still produced less combined output than Asia, Oceania, the Middle East and eastern parts of Europe and Africa.
The problem with this chart is that it's heavily biasing the "center of economic activity" towards the center of the Map. The reason it's constantly above Europe is that Europe is pictured between Asia and America.<p>If you center the Map over America you'll see the center of economic activity being America. If you center it over Asia, it'll be Asia.<p>Therefore this map does not contain much more information than "Greenwich lies in the middle".