Worth a thousand words

It's more than a picture, actually. It's a subtle and beautiful graph. On one axis is per-capita income. On the other is life expectancy. Each point on the graph is the life expectancy and per-capita GDP for a particular year in two different countries, Cuba and Portugal. The data are from 1959 to 2009.

Starting in 1959, Portugal and Cuba have about the same life expectancy but Cuba about 25% more prosperous than Portugal. After 50 years of communism, life expectancy has gone up dramatically (...