Bright spots in an old land

Lisa Charlotte Muth

Last week, I found out that Germany scores third place when it comes to the countries with the highest median range. Meaning: Germany is old. But of course, the situation is different in different parts of Germany. So this week, we go one level deeper:

Maybe the situation is actually not that different in each district. If we compare the German data with the worldwide data from last week, we’ll find that the youngest German districts are still older than the median age of the entire United States. And the oldest districts still don’t reach the median age of Monaco.

Within this range, however, there is a clear geographical pattern in Germany when it comes to the median age: The population is younger in Western Germany and in the cities than in the sparsely populated areas in East Germany. You can spot the cities in East Germany on this map easily thanks to their brightness.

Chart choices

This week, I chose a map. Choropleth maps like this one are tricky because each district or country can only represent one single value (in comparison, we showed three values per country last week with our dot plot). So I tried to create a scatterplot with this data, too, because I could include the population per district. But the geographical pattern in this data is too striking to NOT choose a map. 

Maps have two big advantages: They’re getting lots of attention. (I love maps. Readers love maps. Everyone loves maps.) And: Readers can find the area they live in really fast, and they can compare it easily with the surrounding areas. 

This week, we’ve seen the data from 2015. But where are we heading? Next week, we’ll look at the outlook. (Are we outlooking? Is this a word? Did I just make this up?) Have a nice week!

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Lisa Charlotte Muth

(she/her, @lisacmuth, @lisacmuth@vis.social) is Datawrapper’s head of communications. She writes about best practices in data visualization and thinks of new ways to excite you about charts and maps. Lisa lives in Berlin.

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