On Thursday night, had a talk to MBAs on logical structuring, storytelling, storyboarding, presentations. Yes, lots to cover in 3 hours.  One area that we went very light on was data visualization. So here’s my contribution.

These are from the Economist’s “graphic detail” column.  Informative, simple.  Economist quotes in blue.

Millions of millionaires (10/22/19)

• The US and China created the vast majority of new millionaires over the last 9 years.
• A lot of this is low interest rates and increasing asset prices. If you have no balance sheet, you’re bumming.
• The wealthiest 10% population have 82% of the wealth. The bottom 50% account for less than 1%.
• Lot of alarming plans to tax the wealthy – Warren (2% on wealth above $50M, and 3% on wealth above $1B) and Sanders (1% on wealth at $32M, and 8% for those above $10B)

How Medicaid reduces evictions(10/21/19)

• The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) mandated an expansion of Medicaid in the US. (Read: healthcare coverage for the poorest Americans). The Supreme Court repealed this arguing that states had a right to choose whether to opt-in, opt-out. (As of today approximately 35/50 have opted in).
• Researchers (N. Zewde, E. Eliason and H. Allen) showed that states that expanded coverage to the poorest Americans saw the rate of evictions drop from 17% to 14% of renter households.
• Huge drop. If you have your healthcare covered, more $$ for rent.  Less likely to be evicted.
• Currently, one-sixth of poor Americans still lack health-care coverage.  Oye-vey.

Governments subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $427bn a year (10/14/19)

• Free-trade folks like me with argue against most subsidies, even more vehement when talking about fossil fuel subsidies. Who wants that?  How big could they be?
• Uh, huge.  $20B in Venezuela, $69B in Iran, $26B in Egypt.
• It’s massively inefficient; apparently, transferring $1 of gas subsidies in Ecuador costs the government $20.

Nearly a third of Latin Americans want to emigrate (9/3/19)

• Latin America GDP fallen for eight years.  Lots of economic mismanagement, corruption, and violence.
• In Venezuela, the inflation rate hit a high of 2,700,000% annually, and by 2018, the average person has lost 24 lbs because of hunger. 13% of the population has fled.
• Of course many people want to leave their home country for better opportunity.

America’s social-media addiction is getting worse (08/08/19)

• People lament the addictive qualities of social media. Looking below, it’s absolutely true.
• What happens when the internet is paid for by advertising?  You optimize for viewing time, frequency.

African swine fever threatens 200m pigs in China (08/06/19)

• Apparently, China is the world’s largest pork producer, home to 1/2 of all pigs on the planet.
• Rabobank, a Dutch bank, estimates that ~ 200m pigs could be lost to disease or slaughter, which is dramatically higher than the official estimate of less than 2M.
• African swine fever is highly contagious and leads to death in 90% case of pigs. No current cure.
• Thankfully, it’s not harmful to humans. Whew.

High internet use and state support help countries ditch cash (08/01/19)

• Is there a correlation between internet usage, state endorsement of a cashless society and less cash? Yes.
• The % of global transactions that are cash fell from 89% in 2013 to 77% today. Huge drop.
• What a difference. Italy transactions are 80% cash, and Norway, 80% cashless.

Fewer American women are working than two decades ago (07/29/19)

• In 1999, 77% of prime-age (25-54) American women were in the labor force – on par with Germany, Britain. Since then, In 2018, this is down 2 percentage points to 75% for the US. Germany +6%, Britain +2%.
• “In the 1980s and 1990s, as rich countries in Europe passed legislation improving conditions for working women—including laws guaranteeing equal pay, maternity leave, access to child care and more flexible work arrangements—America sat on its hands. In 2015 the country ranked 33rd out of 36 rich countries on public spending for families, according to the OECD.” Uh, let’s make America great again, folks. . .

Is Congress rigged in favour of the rich? (06/22/19)

• Seems like both parties are demonizing the rich, and calling the system rigged. Personally, have a lot of opinions on that topic – too much to detail here – but how did the Democrats and Republicans senators vote?
• Researchers (J.Lax and J. Phillips) found that “Democratic senators side with the rich 35% of the time and Republicans do so 86% of the time”
• Note to self: this metric “votes in favor of rich constituents” probably needs your full attention before determining whether you feel this is a calibrated way to pass judgment on senator’s level of progressiveness.

Youngsters are avoiding Facebook—but not the firm’s other platforms (07/20/19)

• We’ve heard rumblings of this before. Young people are leaving Facebook: 1) don’t want to be on the same network as grandma 2) FB focused on news / messages vs. other platforms for documenting images, stories.
• “Facebook does not break down its revenue by platform, but Andy Hargreaves of KeyBanc Capital Markets estimates that 23% of its $68bn turnover this year will come from Instagram.”
• Stopping false news and bogus activity is hard: “The firm says it stopped spammers from creating 2bn fake profiles in the first quarter of 2019.”
• This is not mentioned in the article, but look at the # of users of TikTok in the graph below. Whoa.

Would you live with a Trump supporter? (07/19/19)

• A researcher (R. M. Shafranek) conducted a conjoint analysis to determine which characteristics university students would prefer/not prefer as a roommate.  #1 dislike: different party affiliation.  #2 dislike: dirty.
• “The temptation is to conclude that Americans like living with those who are politically like-minded. In fact it is more that they dislike living with those who think about politics differently.”
• This is massively discouraging. Without trust, diversity doesn’t work.

Trump’s tweet divides Americans (07/17/19)

• Donald Trump has tweeted 6K times (as of July 2019). The Justice Department lawyers have deemed these to be official statements by the US President.
• YouGov, a polling group, have asked a sample of Americans to rate each tweet from (-2 terrible to +2 great).
• The median tweet received an average score of “okay” (-0.2). Super partisan. Democrats rate (-1.1) bad, Republicans (1.0) good. No surprise here, I guess.
• “When asked on July 15th whether he was concerned that some viewed his remarks as racist, Trump said he was not. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” Trump said. That appears to be true.”

Chinese loans to poor countries are surging (07/12/19)

• China is the world’s largest creditor. They’ve loaned $700 Billion to emerging economies since 2000.
• This amount is more than 2x the World Bank and IMF combined. Whoa.
• According to researchers (S. Horn, C. M. Reinhart, C. Trebesch), the 50 biggest recipients of Chinese credit owe debts to China worth about 17% of their GDP on average (see map), up from 1% in 2005.

Speedcubers are solving Rubik’s Cubes at ever-faster speeds (07/11/19)

• The traditional Rubik’s Cube (3x3x3) was invented in 1974 (nice to know).
• Can always be solved in 20 moves (nice to know).
• Recent world record was 3.47 seconds (what?).
• People are getting bored with conventional methods. Think feet, blindfolded, juggling, 3 at a time.

America’s economic expansion is now the longest on record (07/02/19)

• The economic expansion that started in June 2009 has run, uninterrupted for 120+ months.
• ” GDP per person, a measure of economic growth that strips out the effects of a growing population, has inched up by just 1.5% a year. Across the previous ten cycles, it grew by an average of 3.3% a year.”

How to spot a recession (06/11/19)

• Building off the last article, how do you spot a recession?
• A researcher at the Fed (C. Sahm) proposes this method:  “when the three-month average unemployment rate is at least 0.5 percentage points above its minimum from the previous 12 months, the economy is in a recession. This simple measure, it turns out, has correctly called every recession in America since 1970.”
• Currently, this method puts recession at only 10% chance for next year.
• This is in stark contrast with the inverted yield curve which points to a more imminent slowdown.

Can countries lower taxes and raise revenues? (06/19/19)

• This article is about the Laffer curve, a favorite of supply-side economists. The logic is appealing: lower taxes means people have more money to spend, which boosts the economy. Definitely alluring.
• In a recent paper (J Lundberg) shows that for OECD countries, only Sweden would see some stimulative effects of lowering the tax rate on its highest earners. For other countries, the tax rate is at / lower than the optimal point where “cutting the rate” actually helps.
• Key takeaway: cutting taxes all the time does not mean more money circulating in the economy (note: if the US stock market is up 50% over last 3 years, people will invest their $$ in assets, not spend the money).

China is surprisingly carbon-efficient—but still the world’s biggest emitter (05/25/19)

• Two ways to look at China’s carbon emissions: total and per person.
• China is the largest emitter of total greenhouse gas, and will only get larger.
• China’s per person emissions are quite low; similar to Western country per person emissions in 1880s.

American inequality reflects gross incomes as much as taxes (04/13/19)

• The Gini coefficient is one measure of income inequality. 0= everyone’s equal, 100= one person gets everything. So the Economist compared each countries’ Gini coefficient before and after taxes. Fascinating.
• “By this measure at least, America’s tax system is in fact fairly progressive. It does roughly as much to reduce inequality as does Canada’s or Sweden’s (even though most European systems do more).” 
• ” In France government spending accounts for 57% of GDP. America’s federal, state and local authorities spend just 35%. Although pre-tax inequality is almost as high in France as in America, the two countries look very different after taxes.”

Do people become happier after 40? (04/12/19)

• People tend to get happier as they crest 40 years old, forming a bit of a “U shape” of self-reported happiness over their lifetime.  Young = happy, then middle-age (kids, jobs, stress, etc) happiness hits a nadir, then it improves.
• Looking at this graph, looks like US women in their 70s are the happiest.
• Sadly, folks in the former USSR get unhappier as they go.

Economic growth does not guarantee rising happiness (03/21/19)

• Yes, there is a correlation between wealth and happiness. This is particularly true when you look at extremes: poverty = misery.
• However, more $$ does not mean more happiness.  Think: unhappy rich people.
• The Gallup organization finished a happiness report, commissioned by the UN. They found that 43/125 countries had happiness go down, even though GDP went up.  See below.
• Personally, I believe a lot of this happiness is FOMO.  Through FB and other media, we see only the best versions of everyone we know. FOMO is making us very unhappy.