My Sunday reading turned up three examples of glaring numeracy errors. I make plenty of my own errors, so I have sympathy for the perpetrators. But I did want to highlight them as examples of what can happen when quantitative thinking runs off the rails. And the need to remain mathematically vigilant in your daily [...]
Archive for the ‘Data’ Category
A Sunday Numeracy Quiz
Posted in Data, Life, Teaching, tagged Ethicist, Gambling, Graphics, New York Times, Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2012 | 2 Comments »
Getting Better But a Long Way to Go
Posted in Data, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged jobs, unemployment on January 7, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Friday’s jobs data confirmed that labor markets are getting better, but slowly. Payrolls expanded by 200,000, the unemployment rate fell again to 8.5%, weekly hours ticked up from 34.3 to 34.4, and hourly earnings rose by 0.2%. Of course, there is still a long, long way to go. Unemployment and underemployment both remain very high, but [...]
You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure Correctly, NYC Crime Edition
Posted in Data, Microeconomics, tagged Crime, Incentives, Measurement, New York City on January 2, 2012 | 2 Comments »
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. That’s good advice, as far as it goes. But it has a dark underside: managing the measurement rather than actual outcomes. Over at the New York Times, Al Baker and Joseph Goldstein recount a troubling example. To keep reported crime rates low, New York’s Finest may be under [...]
Child Mortality and Development, the Video
Posted in Data, History, International, tagged Data, Development on November 2, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Courtesy of Bill Gates, here’s Hans Rosling talking child mortality and development. (Gates emphasizes foreign aid in his description, but that seems secondary compared to development generally.) Hans Rosling Breaks Down the Impact of Foreign Aid from bgC3 on Vimeo.
Better Than Feared, But Still Mediocre
Posted in Data, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged Data, jobs, Macroeconomics, unemployment on August 5, 2011 | 4 Comments »
America’s job market has been down so long, today’s mediocre report looked like up. The headline figures — payrolls up 117,000, unemployment rate down a tic to 9.1% — were better than most forecasters anticipated. That’s a relief. And many details moved in the right direction as well. Revisions to May and June added another [...]
Ranking U.S. Economic Recoveries
Posted in Data, Macroeconomics, tagged Data, Graphics, Macroeconomics on July 26, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The Wall Street Journal has a lovely graphic this morning illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. economic recoveries since World War II. No surprise, the current recovery is long on weaknesses and short on strengths: The graphic is based on a very similar one the IMF included in its recent overview of the U.S. economy [...]
Misleading Graphics, Not So Honest Tea Edition
Posted in Data, Life, tagged Graphics on June 13, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Are you smarter than Honest Tea, the upstart purveyor of natural (and yummy) teas? To see, please compare the sizes of the yellow and black coffee cups: How big do you think the yellow cup is relative to the black one? About 1/8 the size? About 1/4? Or about 1/2? Take your time. Think about it. [...]
Zanran: Google for Data?
Posted in Data, Economy, Internet, tagged Data, Google, Search, Wolfram Alpha, Zanran on May 13, 2011 | 6 Comments »
Zanran is a new search engine, now in beta testing, that focuses on charts and tables. As its website says: Zanran helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a [...]
A Tepid Quarter for GDP
Posted in Data, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged Data, Economy, GDP on April 28, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Thursday morning brought the first official look at GDP growth in the first quarter. Headline growth was a disappointing, if not surprising, 1.8%. Here’s my usual graph of how various components of the economy contributed to overall growth: Consumers continued to spend at a moderate pace; their spending grew at a 2.7% rate, thus adding [...]
200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes
Posted in Data, International, Macroeconomics, tagged Data, International, Visualization on December 2, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Courtesy of the BBC. here’s the newest version of Hans Rosling’s famous presentation on economic growth and life expectancy. Keep an eye out for the moments in history when life expectancy plummets.
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