economics

An  interactive graphic at Newsweek allows us to explore the amount of money women spend on beauty by their tweens, teens, 30s/40s, 50s, and, then, over the course of their lifetimes.  Below is a screenshots of the summary, click here to visit the graphic, and visit here for details on the numbers.

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Hans Rosling illustrates the increasing urbanization of the world from 1963 to 2004:

Found at GapMinder.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Yes, it’s another table from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. He’s had some great stuff up lately. Here we have changes in compensation (per employee) between 1992 and 2007 for various industries, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data:

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I do question some of these classifications–for instance, is “performing arts, spectator sports, museums, and related activities” really a coherent category? Nonetheless, it provides a relatively consistent measurement of compensation, which is useful for comparing change over time.

I wandered over to the BLS website and ended up on their Occupational Injuries and Illnesses page. There I discovered this in the National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2007:

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Along with the graph, we learn,

Workplace homicides involving police officers and supervisors of retail sales workers both saw substantial increases in 2007.

Police officers makes sense. But retail supervisors? Huh. I wonder what the actual numbers are.

From the same report we get the number and rate of fatalities by industry:

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The extraction industries (mining, forestry, farming, fishing, hunting) are noticeable outliers here, with significantly higher fatality rates (though not overall numbers) than any other industries.

So there’s some totally unconnected information about the labor force for you.

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(Found here, via Thick Culture.)

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight put up this graph of U.S. household debt (from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances):

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Silver says,

Per-family household debt increased by about 130% in real dollars between 1989 and 2007, from roughly $42,000 per family in 1989 to $97,000 eighteen years later. Most of that increase has come during the past six or seven years — household debt increased by 52% between 2001 and 2007 alone. Almost all of the debt (about 85%) falls into the category that the Fed calls “secured by residential property” — which means mortgages and home-equity loans.

Some other images from the SCF Chartbook (available here)–and pay attention to the y axis, since the scale isn’t the same in all of them:

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This next one is for rural (non-MSA) and urban (MSA) areas:

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The Chartbook has images of the mean values for all these calculations as well, I just prefer the median to reduce the effects of outlier incomes.

In the wake of the embarassing incident where car company executives were called out for flying in private jets to beg Congress for money, Cessna, manufacturer of private jets, is fighting back.  At their new website, www.cessnarise.com, they’re framing the attack as skeptical hyperbole that doesn’t take into account the facts and recommending that potential purchasers of private jets “rise” above it all.  Some screenshots:

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Notice that Cessna frames the resistance to private-jet-flying chastisement as a “challenge” that should be overcome.

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I don’t know whether private jet ownership is, in fact, economically smart.  I am rather sure that it depends on the company/person.  I do, however, think it’s interesting the way that Cessna is framing a rejection of the point made by Congress (that it is, perhaps, indulgent to insist upon private jet travel) in moral terms.  Customers should “rise” above, take on the “challenge,” fight the “naysayers,” beat the “skeptics.”    Real economics, then, appear to take a backseat to resisting the accusation that some of us enjoy extreme class privilege that is not necessarily justified by the books.

The Guardian is now making all of the data it uses in its stories available for free online. You can browse their data on subjects as wide ranging as imports and exports of plastic bags, reported amounts of exercise, and the best selling singles of 2008 at their Data Store. As one example, I’ve pasted in 20 government financial bail outs as a percentage of their GDP:

 

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In this 7 1/2 minute video Hans Rosling maps the relationship between life expectancy, GDP, and sexual health and rights over 300 years of Swedish history:

Found at GapMinder.