Archive for the 'Critiques and Commentary' Category

The L-curve

Published on April 3, 2007 in Critiques and Commentary, Income - Inequality, Distribution, United States and Video. Closed

The L-curve has an alternative approach to visualizing income distribution using a football field. However, I was inspired by the the video. In it he mentions the importance of investment income for high income earners. While labor income is the way most people make their money. So for my next set of graphs I will be exploring what components make up the income of the highest income brackets.

[tags]income distribution, US income distribution, US income inequality, income inequality[/tags]

Popularity: 3% [?]

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The New Inequality

Published on December 10, 2006 in Critiques and Commentary and United States. Closed

Here is another New York Times article. This one touches on some of the themes that keep coming up in the income inequality discussion, such as the role of the global economy, education, government taxes policy, and the changes in the income distribution during the last 30 years:

. . . From World War II through the 1970s, while most Americans were getting solid raises every year, the incomes of the richest 1 percent were doing only a little better than inflation. Since the 1980s, the two groups have switched places. The affluent have received huge gains, and everyone else’s pay growth has slowed down. For the last six decades, in other words, the American economy has been much more of a zero-sum game than we might like to believe.

Popularity: 2% [?]

CNN International Redesign

Published on July 5, 2006 in Critiques and Commentary. 1 Comment

CNN International Redesign

I analyzed the presentation of economics data on TV in my Master’s thesis so I was interested in the last example in the article. Television and dense data displays don’t not go together.

CNN Screenshot

Popularity: 2% [?]

Do people worry more about income volitility or inequality?

Published on June 26, 2006 in Critiques and Commentary and Income - Inequality, Distribution. Closed

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):

It may just be that income inequality isn’t the real story. Instead, suggests Hacker of Yale, it may be income volatility. “While the gaps between the rungs on the ladder of our economy have increased, what has increased even more quickly is how far people slip down the ladder when they lose their footing,” Hacker says. According to his research, pretax family income volatility peaked in the early to mid-1990s at a level between four and five times as high as its level in the early 1970s. Although volatility fell during the strong economy of late 1990s, it remained well above 1970s levels, and it’s on the rise again. “I just analyzed the 2002 data,” he says. “Family income volatility increased by 50 percent over the past two years, so it is now three times its early-1970s level.” Hacker says the median decline in income for families that suffer a drop has increased from more than 25 percent in the 1970s to about 40 percent today. Moreover, research by Princeton University economist Henry Farber found that people who lost their jobs after the Internet bubble popped–and then found new ones–earned on average 13 percent less in their new positions.

[tags] income inequality, income volatility, Jacob Hacker[/tags]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Google Finance vs Yahoo Finance

Published on June 18, 2006 in Bar Chart, Critiques and Commentary, Financial markets and Line Graph. Closed

While Yahoo is still my main source for financial data especially when I need historical numbers, I did like the interactive graph Google developed.

Google Finance Graph

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% [?]

Relatively Poor

Published on June 14, 2006 in Critiques and Commentary, Data Methodology and Income - Low. Closed

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% [?]