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Posts Tagged ‘Data’

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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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A Tepid Quarter for GDP

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 [...]

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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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October was another solid month for America’s railroads, according to the Association for American Railroads. October traffic was 11% higher than the depressed levels of a year ago: Intermodal traffic (think trailers and containers) is up 14% over 2009, thus returning to 2008 levels: Carloads (think bulk materials like coal, grains, minerals, and chemicals plus autos) [...]

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BEA released its first estimates for third-quarter GDP yesterday. Headline growth was a disappointing, if not surprising, 2.0%. Here’s my usual graph of how various components of the economy contributed to overall growth: Housing fell back into the red, while non-residential structures eked out a small gain. Consumers continued to spend at a moderate pace [...]

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Happy World Statistics Day

Collecting and disseminating useful data about the economy, government finances, demographics, health, the environment, etc. can be a difficult business. Survey methodologies and estimation techniques are inevitably open to legitimate criticism and also attract a good deal of not-so-legitimate criticism (for examples of both, see the debate over the “birth death model” in estimating payroll employment). But all [...]

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August was a busy month for America’s railroads, according to the Association for American Railroads. Traffic spiked up, as often happens during the month. More importantly, August traffic was 11% higher than a year ago (the same gain as reported in July): Carloads (think bulk materials like coal, grains, minerals, and chemicals plus autos) are [...]

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