Economy
5 Stories: Economic Cliff
When the current recession started back in late 2008 many economists, bankers and politicians described the situation in very vivid language. “The economy is going over a cliff” many of them said, yet no visual image accompanied those words. In a world where newsrooms are comfortable with infographics quotes from experts like “The economy... »
Reviewing an NYTimes Infographic
Recently the New York Times ran an infographic on the proposed 2011 Federal Budget. It’s a nearly perfect use of the treemap capability in data visualization where the size of the boxes is proportional to the amount of spending. If you click on a region it zooms in revealing a bit more information than... »
Updated Popsicle Economy
Just a short article this week. (Another short article may appear later in the week.) I’m slowly updating the graphics and visualizations in earlier articles. This week I’ve updated the original Popsicle Stick Economy simulation to include a real-time sparkline showing the “level of the economy”. Every time someone uses a babysitter a counter... »
Not All Spending Is Stimulus
President Obama announced a 3 year freeze on the discretionary part of the federal budget. Many liberal economists (including Paul Krugman) decried this as a wrong step. In an economic downturn the government should be spending and not cutting back. I agree in theory, but the question is does the theory apply in this... »
Bubbles Everywhere (Housing Part 2)
This is the third and probably final article that examines the recent housing bubble. The previous 2 articles (here and here) are related in that they both examine data that shows a bubble is underway. The obvious piece of data to look at involves the price increase of the commodity in question (houses). Somewhat... »
Revisiting the Housing Bubble (part one)
Our recent economic primer has us re-thinking a previous housing bubble article. There was nothing wrong with the earlier article, but the graphs we used were not as dramatic as one that Yale economist Robert J. Shiller created back in 2006. The graph below was pulled from a New York Times article (in 2006)... »
Krugman’s Popsicle Stick Economy
It is very difficult to talk about the economy and the steps the government is taking to fix the economy without at least a rudimentary understanding of how the economy works. One of the best explanations I’ve seen was an article written more than 10 years ago by Noble Prize winner Paul Krugman. One... »
What Does a Housing Bubble Look Like?
Many sources have reported that the housing bubble was spurred by a significant increase in investment in the housing market. The US housing market was seen as a safe place to invest money at a reasonable rate of return. When the financial wizards abused a method to diversify risk and applied it to home... »
Wisconsin is Bleeding, Are the Band-Aids Working?
The unemployment rate has ticked up again and there’s a round of articles discussing it. One in particular (FlowingData.com) shows a map of the US color coded with the unemployment rate by county. I’ve reproduced that chart below, if you click on it you will be taken to the original website. But this is only... »
Nobel Economics Prize 2009
On Monday October 12 Elinor Ostrom was one of 2 winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Wall Street Journal ran a brief article on both winners and cited her work as: Ms. Ostrom’s work challenged the view that when people share a finite resource, they will end up destroying it — what... »
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