this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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that is a fascinating map; i noticed that despite making projections about 2025 the date of that post is actually 2012; Business Insider attributes it to McKinsey, but via ZeroHedge (who charges for access to their archives).
I wanted more context so I spent a few minutes searching; in case anyone else is curious it comes from a report called "Urban world: Cities and the rise of the consuming class" by McKinsey Global Institute.
Here is their summary of it, and here is the 92 page PDF of the full report.
here is MGI's 'economic center of gravity' methodology
The center of gravity analysis is based on country-level historical estimates from Angus Maddison for the period AD 1 until 2007, and country-level growth rates from Cityscope 2.0 until 2025. We then allocated each country’s GDP value to the approximate center of landmass of the respective country. The same center of each country was used throughout the entire time frame. To calculate the global center of gravity, landmass radian coordinates were transformed into Cartesian coordinates with a tool from the UK Ordnance Survey that uses ED50/ UTM data and projection (see www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps). We then transformed these coordinates into respective momentums and averaged these to a true economic center of gravity for each year, located within the sphere of the earth. To illustrate the shift of gravity, we lengthened the vectors from the center of the earth to the center of gravity so that they lie on the earth’s surface. Although the concept of “surfacing” might create problems for interpreting data, both the resulting direction and the magnitude of the surfaced shifts were directionally consistent with the internal shifts, too. The four periods with the fastest shift, 2000–10, 1940–50, and 2010–25, maintain the same rank order, while the 1500–1820 period ranks 11th on surface but eighth on the “true” center of gravity.here is what they say about ~500 years ago
Until 1500, Asia was the center of gravity of the world economy, accounting for roughly two-thirds of global GDP. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, urbanization and industrialization vaulted Europe and the United States to prominence. We are now observing a decisive shift in the balance back toward Asia—at a speed and on a scale never before witnessed. China’s economic transformation resulting from urbanization and industrialization is happening at 100 times the scale of the first country in the world to urbanize—the United Kingdom—and at ten times the speed (Exhibit E2).but wait, where did they get that GDP data from?
They actually cite Angus Maddison's Monitoring the World Economy 1820–1992 which doesn't sound like something that goes to AD 1. It looks like Maddison also published The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (currently only a limited preview on archive.org) in 2001, which this reproduces Appendix B of - which seems like probably their source:World GDP, 20 Countries and Regional Totals, 1-2001 AD
I'm not sure how Geary–Khamis dollars ("a hypothetical unit of currency that has the same purchasing power parity that the U.S. dollar had in the United States at a given point in time") are supposed to work for time periods prior to the existence of the United States, but i think I've spent enough time on this rabbit hole for now :)
Bravo on that deep dive, and thank you.