Income buys years, but the returns shrink fast, and at any income level some countries get far more than others. Each dot is a country. Press play, click a dot, then test your own feel for the curve.
You see only the income. Drag to your guess of life expectancy, then reveal. Five random countries, 2022 data.
The gap is a country's life expectancy minus what the typical curve predicts at its income, for the year on the slider. Tap a column to sort.
World Bank, World Development Indicators, database last updated 2026-10-08, fetched through the World Bank API on 20 October 2026: Life expectancy at birth (SP.DYN.LE00.IN), GDP per capita, PPP, constant 2021 international dollars (NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD), Population, total (SP.POP.TOTL). 199 economies that have all three values in 2022; aggregates such as regions are excluded, and a few countries lack early years. Dot area is population. The typical curve is a least-squares quadratic fit of life expectancy on the natural log of income, unweighted, refit for every year. Correlation is not causation: health systems, conflict, inequality and disease shape both axes. The 2020 to 2022 dips are mostly COVID-19 deaths.