(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.

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 56,000 jobs, the U-6 measure of underemployment ticked down to 16.1%, and hourly earnings were up 0.4%.

But we still need much stronger job growth if we are ever going to get America back to work. Both unemployment and underemployment remain stubbornly high:

(The U-6 measures includes the officially unemployed, marginally attached workers, and those who are working part-time but want full-time work.)

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 (officially known as the 2011 Article IV Consultation).  I’ve pasted the original IMF graphic below.

The IMF one is excellent, but it’s instructive to note the many ways the WSJ graphics team made it even better (e.g., by transposing the columns and rows):

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 PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts.

Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data.

This is a stellar idea. The web holds phenomenal amounts of data that are hard to find buried inside documents. And Zanran offers a fast way to find and scan through documents that may have relevant material. Particularly helpful is the ability to hover your cursor over each document to see the chart Zanran’s thinks you are interested in before you click through to the document.

Zanran is clearly in beta, however, and has some major challenges ahead. Perhaps most important are determining which results should rank high and identifying recent data. If you type “united states GDP” into Zanran, for example, the top results are rather idiosyncratic and there’s nothing on the first few pages that directs you to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Google, in contrast, has the BEA as its third result. And its first result is a graphical display of GDP data via Google’s Public Data project. Too bad, though, it goes up only to 2009. For some reason, both Google and Zanran think the CIA is the best place to get U.S. GDP data. It is a good source for international comparisons, but it falls out of date.

Here’s wishing Zanran good luck in strengthening its search results as its competes with Google, Wolfram Alpha, and others in the data search.

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 1.9 percentage points to overall growth. Equipment and software investment (up at a 12.6% rate), inventories, and exports also contributed to growth.

Residential investment fell back into negative territory, reflecting the latest down leg in the housing market. But the real negatives were structures (down at a 21.7% rate, thus cutting 0.6 percentage points from growth) and government (down at a 5.2% rate). Defense spending fell sharply (11.7% rate), and state and local continued its decline (down at a 3.3% rate).

Note: As usual, imports subtracted from growth as conventionally measured. As discussed in this post and this post, I’d like to see GDP contributions data that allocate imports across the other sectors. Such data would reveal, for example, how much consumer spending contributed to growth in the U.S. economy itself. Presumably it’s less than the 1.9 percentage points shown in the chart, which reflects consumer spending that was satisfied by both domestic and international production, but we don’t know by how much.

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) are up almost 9%:

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 (consumer spending grew at a 2.6% rate, thus adding 1.8 percentage points to growth). But the big stories were the continued boost from inventories, and the continued drag (in GDP-accounting terms) from imports.

The pessimistic take on inventories (see, for example, this tweet from Nouriel Roubini) is that the third quarter build up was unintentional, and thus is bearish for fourth quarter growth. The optimistic take, I suppose, is that maybe businesses see stronger demand ahead. But that feels rather, er, speculative.

For my usual set of caveats about the import figures (and, therefore, all of these figures), see my last post on the GDP numbers.

So in honor of the first World Statistics Day, let me quote from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon:

I commend the dedication that many statistical experts bring to their reports and publications.  They carry out an essential public service — one that promotes peace and democracy by giving citizens reliable and impartial public information about their communities.  Their core values — service, integrity and professionalism — deserve full support in all nations.

Carloads (think bulk materials like coal, grains, minerals, and chemicals plus autos) are up about 6% over 2009:

Intermodal traffic (think trailers and containers) is up almost 20%, thus returning to 2008 levels: