A Cartoon History of the Financial Crisis

Flowing Data is a great site for those of us who can never get enough of the visual display of quantitative information. Here is a video that vividly displays nuts and bolts of the financial crisis.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Health Care Redux

Most Americans believe that the nation’s health care system is in need of substantial changes. But there is less support for completely rebuilding the health care system than there was in April 1993, during the early stage of the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful effort to revamp health care.

Health care reform failed in 1993. Support for reform is lower now than then.With an eye to the current round of health care reform, I’ll let you finish the syllogism.

Source: Pew

Noam Chomsky: A Rebuttal

In addition to the monies gleaned from the American War Machine as a professor at MIT, gadfly and self described "parasite" Noam Chomsky has made a tidy sum for himself from a lifetime of assailing Uncle Sam for being one of the largest, if not the greatest, sources of terror in the world today. If we should subscribe to this way of thinking, then the history of the 20th Century would make little sense. Take the regions of the world in the last half of the 20th Century, rank them according to the extent of Uncle Sam’s intervention, by either foreign direct investment or arms and soldiers. Europe would be on top, Africa would be on bottom. Whether you measure the results by GDP per capita or the UN’s Human Development Index, conditions are worst where America has intervened the least, best where Uncle Sam has intervened the most.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same. (With Some Exceptions)

Wealth in ~1500
Wealth in ~1900

Wealth in ~1960

Wealth in ~1990

Wealth in ~2000

Wealth in ~2015

Here is a series of maps that display the distribution of wealth by country over time. The sizes of the countries on the maps have been adjusted to reflect the percent of world wealth. Thus France is larger than Brazil on the maps, even though, geographically, Brazil is larger.

We can see that Europe has had a good run for the last 500 years. China and India, less so. I don’t trust the numbers for the New World circa 1500. Charles Mann has made the case that the field of pre-Columbian studies has changed dramatically in the last quarter century. I don’t think the reference books in the field of economic history have had a chance to catch up.

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Projecting forward to 2015, it looks like the distribution of wealth in the Old World will look more and more like it did back in 1500. The more things change, the more they stay the same. India and Africa are expected to underperform compared to their relative performance 500 years ago. Room for improvement? Cause for optimism?

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Worldmapper includes this little statistical gem with its map of wealth in 1900:

In 1900 the world[’s] total [wealth] was US$2 trillion when expressed in 1990 purchasing power parity.

2 trillion dollars! The bailout alone will cost more than that this year, not to mention the price tag on the new and ambitious social programs that Uncle Sam has in store for us. One thing we can say is that the world is a lot wealthier now than it was 100 years ago -- a lot. The relative distribution of wealth reflected in the series of maps overlooks the growth in absolute terms. There is a lot more wealth around that can be safely wasted.

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Or can it?

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Source: Worldmapper

Rock of Ages

Wikipedia has a list of verified oldest people.

Among the top 100 verified oldest people:

- Half the population of the world is women, but there are more women than men on the list of verified oldest at a rate of 9 to 1.

- 1 in 20 people on Earth is American, but most on the list of verified oldest come from America.

- About 1 in 8 Americans is black, but among the top 10 verified oldest Americans, four are black.

- About 1 in 3 Americans live in the South, but among the top 10 verified oldest Americans, more than half are from the South.

Note to self: work harder at being a southern, black, American female.

Source: Wikipedia

Borat's Great Grandmother?

In August of 1997, Jeanne Calment of France died at the age of 122 -- the oldest verified person on record. Mdme. Calment may have a challenger in one Sohan Dosova of Kazakhstan.

Meet Sohan Dosova - the newly found treasure of Kazakhstan. She is 130 years old, at least she is according to her documents. The Soviet passport issued in the early 1980s states that Sohan Dosova was born in the Karaganda region on 27 March 1879.

Wikipedia has a list of verified oldest people.

130 is considerably older than any other contender for the award of Oldest Person. Excluding Sohan Dosova, the top five ages are 122, 120[?], 119, 117, and 117. Notice that the other contenders for Oldest Person are all within two years of the next person on the list. There is a whopping 8 year gap between Dosova and Clement. Likely there was some exaggeration in Dosova’s age. We don’t have her birth certificate, only a passport that dates from the early 1980s. That’s about 25 years ago. If she claims to be 130 now, she would have been claiming an age over 100 then -- something that would have been a feather in her hat even at that time. Even so, she might be a real contender.

If she really is 130, shouldn’t she have great-great-grandchildren, or even great-great-great-grandchildren by now? Assuming generations of 25 years, there should be five generations of Dosovas. The article says her oldest granddaughter is 53. If Sohan had a child at 20 and that child had a daughter at the age of 25, that would make Sohan 98, not 130. A better estimate of her age could be reconstructed by looking at her family tree and working backwards from known and recorded birth dates.

Is there a way to verify a living person’s age directly? Telomeres shorten with each cell division. And the article says she still has one tooth left.

Source: BBC

"Distortionary and Dangerous"

"If you remember only one thing I say -- this is actually the most important thing to remember -- enlarging a budget deficit is an especially distortionary and dangerous form of taxation."

Why? Because you can’t escape the laws of arithmetic. Because public borrowing is deferred taxation (with interest), and the Devil of Taxation that you know here and now is not as bad as the Devil of Taxation that you don’t know at some point in the uncertain future.

The relevant commentary begins at 9:47