How The Olympic Medal Tables Explain The World

Gold medals for the Rio Olympic Games are displayed at a coin factory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 18, 2016.
Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images
Imagine a Martian trying to make sense of this world and the only available data are the Summer Olympic medal tables from the past century.
How much would that explain? Quite a lot, it turns out. In fact, it would be challenging to find anything so concise that say so much about the past century as the tables below.
The four bar charts show the coun