Suzzallo Library, Seattle, Washington, USA
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
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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
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