And for legends like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Estée Lauder, and Richard Branson – well, they got into the money-making game early. From hawking golf balls to bootstrapping student magazines, many of these iconic entrepreneurs started their very first businesses in their childhood or teenage years. Not all of these enterprises fared well, but they did give these eventual magnates an early taste of the startup life. Childhood Ambition Today’s infographic comes to us from Colonial Life, and it showcases the early endeavors of ten successful business greats:...

After all, the sun puts out 3.8 x 10^26 watts of power, and NASA scientists estimate that even capturing 0.0001% of what hits the earth would be enough to service all of our current energy needs. Today, we’re obviously not there – but we’re making substantial progress. Solar cells are cheaper than ever before, and solar is finally getting queued up as a part of the future energy supply mix....

The next generation of investors will be younger and much more diverse, with women taking an increasingly prominent role in building and growing family and personal wealth. Today’s infographic comes to us from New York Life Investments, and it showcases how this new paradigm will shape the future of products and services on offer in the industry, as well as how wealth managers can cater to these changing needs....

Visualizing Chinese Investment in Africa We have said previously that Africa is the new land of opportunity for speculators and investors. Although there is no shortage of risks, the continent is home to vast amounts of resource wealth, the fastest growing class of millionaires, and even the world’s fastest growing city. The Chinese must agree that there is great opportunity to be found on the second largest continent. That’s why over the last decade, China has increasingly poured billions of dollars of foreign direct investment capital into Africa....

When people think of freedom, they often think it in the physical sense, such as the ability to act and behave in certain ways without fear of punishment, or freedom of movement within one’s country. When a nation chooses to restrict freedom in the physical world, the results are often hard to ignore. Protests are met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Road checks pop up along transportation routes. Journalists are detained....

Looking beyond these big picture gains, many communities in the United States are struggling. Check cashing stores outnumber McDonald’s locations, the opioid epidemic rages on, and tens of millions are living in poverty around the country. It’s becoming more clear that the recovery from the financial crisis has been highly uneven. The Data Behind Distress To understand the disconnect between struggling counties and a high-flying national economy, researchers at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) created the Distressed Communities Index: To calculate the “health” of communities around the country, the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) looked at everything from vacancy rates to median income ratios....

In 2018, total global exports exceeded $19 trillion, including specialized goods falling into almost every possible category imaginable. Whether you’re talking about German cars, Bangladeshi t-shirts, Saudi oil, or Swiss milk chocolate, just about anything is available on the world market for a price – and the world’s largest exporting countries aim to take advantage. Ranked: The 15 Largest Exporters in 2018 Today’s visualization comes to us from HowMuch.net, and it resizes countries based on their most recent export numbers, as per data from the World Trade Organization (WTO)....

Mining M&A Has Nowhere To Go But Up In 2015 [Chart] The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays. This week, Alamos Gold and AuRico announced a merger worth $1.5 billion. This is all while broad speculation continues that former Xstrata boss Mick Davis is looking to finally deploy his $5.6 billion war chest held by his company, X2 Resources. Common wisdom is that the majority of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) such as these take place at both the peaks and the troughs of the market....

However, new research suggests otherwise. Using over a million real-time reports from a large U.S. sample group, a recent study found that happiness increases linearly with reported income (logarithmic), and continues to rise beyond the $80,000/year mark. Below, we’ll provide more details on the research methodology, while touching on a few possible reasons why higher incomes may improve people’s happiness levels. How is Happiness Measured? Past research on happiness relative to income has relied on retrospective data, which leaves room for human memory errors....

There are several reasons for this crisis and the economic turmoil has sparked mass protests and violence across the country. This visual breaks down some of the elements that led to Sri Lanka’s current situation. A Timeline of Events The ongoing problems in Sri Lanka have bubbled up after years of economic mismanagement. Here’s a brief timeline looking at just some of the recent factors. 2009 In 2009, a decades-long civil war in the country ended and the government’s focus turned inward towards domestic production....

After months of research and design, we submitted Signals to the printers in September, and we are delighted to announce that it is officially available for purchase. What’s Signals all About? Did you know, that over the next three years humanity will have created more new data than in all of human history combined? More data inevitably means more complexity, which makes it harder to narrow down the root causes that will lead to future trends....

This year, we published more than 300 posts on Visual Capitalist, getting well over 30 million views along the way. Many of these graphics are visually stunning, but there’s only room for 19 posts on the annual list of our best work. Below, you’ll find the Top Infographics of 2019 list, which contains our most popular infographics, as well as a curation of staff favorites for the year. New this year is our “Viewer’s Choice” award, which is given to the best visualization, as chosen by our loyal VC+ readership....

Long before the invention of modern day maps or gunpowder, the planet’s major powers were already duking it out for economic and geopolitical supremacy. Today’s chart tells that story in the simplest terms possible. By showing the changing share of the global economy for each country from 1 AD until now, it compares economic productivity over a mind-boggling time period. Originally published in a research letter by Michael Cembalest of JP Morgan, we’ve updated it based on the most recent data and projections from the IMF....

As our understanding of medicine has evolved, we’ve been able to develop drugs to aid with some of the most common medical conditions—from pain and blood pressure drugs to asthma medication, thyroid treatments, and antidepressants. This graphic uses prescribed medicines data from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, released in 2021 for the 2019 calendar year. It also uses supporting drug and health information from MedlinePlus. What are the Most Prescribed Drugs in America?...

Remarkable Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering It is the incredible science that is behind our technology that makes future business and investing success possible. Today’s infographic looks at some of the remarkable advances in electrical and computer engineering. Nanotube transistors are expected to replace the current generation of silicon-based transistors. They are smaller in size and are only nanometers long, yet they offer higher processing speeds and lower power consumption....

In this graphic sponsored by Global X ETFs, we’ve visualized the largest corporate hacks of 2021, as measured by ransom size. The full list is also tabulated below. *Requested but not paid in full. Source: Microsoft (2021), CRN (2021) Continue reading below for details on some of these extraordinary hacks. Energy: Colonial Pipeline Co. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack was the largest ever cyberattack on an American oil infrastructure target....

The Collapse of Commodities in One Simple Chart This chart from Macquarie puts the year in perspective for commodity investors. It covers various asset classes including equities, FX markets, bonds, and commodity prices, and charts them YTD in terms of US dollars and expressed as a percentage. For a simple chart, there is a lot of information here to consider. For starters, on the far right is the prime culprit in stymying commodity markets: the Dollar Index....

Created in 1913, Henry Ford’s assembly line greatly reduced the time it took to build a car. This also made cars more affordable, and America’s automotive industry quickly became the largest in the world. As we can see in the chart above, this dominance wouldn’t last forever. From a high of nearly 10 million cars per month in the 1970s, the U.S. produced just 1.4 million in June 2021. Here are some reasons for why the country produces a fraction of the cars it used to....

The Hyperloop: Disrupting the Transportation Industry As if the successes of Paypal, Tesla and sending things into space weren’t enough, Elon Musk is at it again. Proposed last year, Musk’s innovative Hyperloop transportation system has the very real potential of being a disruptive technology that changes they way we commute and travel. The aim of the Hyperloop is to connect adjacent major cities that have frequent travel between them, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco....

on Did you know that nearly one-fifth of all the gold ever mined is held by central banks? Besides investors and jewelry consumers, central banks are a major source of gold demand. In fact, in 2022, central banks snapped up gold at the fastest pace since 1967. However, the record gold purchases of 2022 are in stark contrast to the 1990s and early 2000s, when central banks were net sellers of gold....