---
title: Families and longer lives
description: Fertility and life expectancy across countries, 1960–2020.
version: 1.0.0
styles: [air]
---

In many countries, longer lives accompanied smaller families. Play the years or choose one frame to compare countries. Each bubble is one country; its area represents population and its colour represents Gapminder's world region. The axes are linear.

```chart
type: scatter
title: Explore how countries moved over six decades
subtitle: Country observations every five years; bubble area represents population
data: { csv: data/families-and-lives.csv }
encoding: { x: babies_per_woman, y: life_expectancy, size: population, color: region, label: country }
axes:
  x: { label: Babies per woman }
  y: { label: Life expectancy, unit: years }
style: { ratio: '4:3' }
controls:
  - { kind: playback, id: year, field: year, label: Year, speed: 1000, loop: true, initial: '2020' }
```

*Source: Based on free [Gapminder data](https://www.gapminder.org/data/), fast-track snapshot, fertility v15, life expectancy v15 and population v8, with Gapminder's four world regions; [CC BY 4.0](https://www.gapminder.org/free-material/). This frozen extract includes entities marked `un_state` by Gapminder with all three measures at every selected five-year interval.*

## A relationship, not an explanation

These observations do not establish why fertility or life expectancy changed. A bubble combines national estimates; it cannot show the distribution within a country. A country missing a required measure is absent from that frame. The CSV retains the extracted observations so you can inspect the coverage.

Hover or focus a country for its values. Use the year control to compare snapshots, and use the table or CSV for the observations behind the marks.