Legal Drinking Age Around the World

As you probably know, different countries have different legal age limits for drinking alcoholic beverages. In the United States, the age is 21. In some places in the world, there is no set age. In most places, the legal age is 18 to drink a non-spirit beverage such as beer in a public place without a guardian.

The map above, based on data from Wikipedia, shows where in the world you’re legally allowed to drink a beer in a public place. It’s slightly generalized and doesn’t take into account that in some places you have to be older to purchase the beverage, but it gives you a good idea of the age limits globally.

This by the way is part of new category I’m calling my sketchbook. I need a place where I can mess around with different formats without worrying about what is the “right” way to do it.

Relevant tutorials: Choropleth Maps and Shapefiles in R / How to Make an Animated Growth Map in R

Tags: ,

Is the government telling women not to drink? How many microbes in the human body?

homepage_734x546pxThe headlines called it “incredibly condescending” (Alexandra Petri, ComPost),  “unrealistic” (Jia Tolentino, Jezebel), and “bonkers” (Olga Khazan and Julie Beck, The Atlantic.) The post from the aptly named Brandy Zadrozny at The Daily Beast) was

Alcohol consumption per drinker

We've seen rankings for alcohol consumption per capita around the world. These tend to highlight where people drink and abstain, but what about consumption among only those who drink? The Economist looked at this sub-population. Towards the top, you see countries where much of the population abstains but those who do drink appear to drink at higher volumes.

Drinking among drinkers

Of course, it's better to take this with a grain of salt until you see the standard errors on these estimates.