Counting global income inequality, what would Olympic coverage look like
if we considered national wealth alongside medal counts?
When the 2018 Winter Olympics came to a close last month, the global consensus was that by the count of gold medals, Norway and Germany took the top two spots. But is a medal count alone the best way to measure the “winners” of these games? Or should we consider the larger structural and contextual conditions of each country when we measure who took home the most medals?
Given the global inequality between nations, perhaps we should compare countries by their medal count measured against their GDP per capita, known as a resident’s purchasing power parity (PPP). Two years ago, I measured the rankings of the Rio Summer Games using this method. What do the numbers look like for Pyeongchang?
First, let’s look at the top ten countries, ranked below by gold medals. See the full article.
