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Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for the website.
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He is a visiting research fellow at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation. Derek has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.

The Most Amazing Statistic in the World*

By Derek Thompson
Jan 14 2010, 4:00 PM ET Comment

*That is, in the World Progress Report. It's an awesome graph distilling United Nations data on population, poverty, work, businesses and technology. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. For exmaple, did you know that Macau is the most densely populated country in the world? Or that Andorra has 0% unemployment?



Click here to see a bigger, browse-able version of the report below.


I'm fascinated by the hours worked statistic in the middle-right of the graph. In some corners, we talk about "European" traditions as though the proximity of the countries and the glue of the Euro homogenizes their customs. But working hours in Greece are more than 30 or 40 percent of working hours in the Netherlands, Norway and Germany.

Click on the map and tell me: What do you find most surprising?

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