Making the “Invisible Hand” Visible
While Yahoo is still my main source for financial data especially when I need historical numbers, I did like the interactive graph Google developed.
It is little jerky when the graph is updating, but the interaction builds upon Google Map’s click and drag behavior and integrates the news into the graph which is very helpful.
[tags] Google Finance [/tags]
Popularity: 2% [?]
My mother pointed out that I never clearly defined what I meant by Top 1%, Top 0.1% and Top 0.01%. So returning to the Excel file posted on the web site of Emmanuel Saez (Professor of Economics at Berkeley):
In 2004, you would have needed an income of at least:
$250,995 to make the top 1%
$837,892 to make the top 0.1%
$3,642,236 to make the top 0.01%
Popularity: 3% [?]
An interesting New Yorker article about the methods used to measure poverty. The thing they point out that I would agree with is that poverty becomes a relative term when a country gets rich enough so the basic necessities can be made available to all. It is the distribution of wealth within a country (or your community) that determines whether you are deprived since it is only when you see what other people have that you realize you don’t have enough. (Again, assuming you have food to eat and a home to live in and a sense of security that comes from knowing this will be that case in the future.)
In the U.S., it is the presence of great inequality of wealth that undermines people’s feeling of well-being and also places them at a disadvantage relative to their fellow citizens. From the article:
Since relative deprivation confers many of the disadvantages of absolute deprivation, it should be reflected in the poverty statistics. A simple way to do this would be to classify a household as impoverished if its pre-tax income was, say, less than half the median income—the income of the household at the center of the income-distribution curve. In 2004, the median pre-tax household income was $44,684; a poverty line based on relative deprivation would have been $22,342. (As under the current system, adjustments could be made for different family sizes.)
Popularity: 2% [?]
I stumbled across this site, Historyshots, which sells posters that visualize historical events, from sports to military. While I didn’t see any economic posters like mine, their work looks very impressive, at least on the web. I will have to order a couple to take a closer look.
On a side note I thought the navigation of their new site is unique if a little confusing. I refer to the numbers across the top of the page, which link to individual posters. I wonder what will happen when the reach their 52th poster
Popularity: 2% [?]
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Do people worry more about income volitility or inequality?
A U.S News & World Report article proposes several possible sources for the economic anxiety felt by many Americans, including rising income inequality. But what caught my eye was a comment by a political scientist (Jacob Hacker):
[tags] income inequality, income volatility, Jacob Hacker[/tags]
Popularity: 2% [?]
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