In: Finance Global Economy History Interactive Maps Politics Updated regularly
6 Mar 2012I’m not a fan of the Heritage Foundation, and the one time I dug into the data of their Economic Freedom Index I found that they occasionally compare apples and oranges to get around data scarcity – BUT: they do put a large research effort into the report each year. The below interactive map is well executed – but you should drill down to country level data to get a feel for what is really being measured (click on a country, then the “learn more about this country” link that pops up in the lower left. Why this requires two steps I have no idea).
A wonderful post over at The Big Picture that takes both liberals and conservatives to the wood shed over their abuse of economic indicators and charts that show correlation but not causation.
Note: The comments over there are worth a read as well.
In: Politics
24 Feb 2012Nice chart from the NYT showing average S&P 500 company tax rates 2005-10: total taxes (fed,state,local,foreign) over pre-tax earnings, by sector. A weighted average dot would have been nice for each sector. (related article)
In: Politics
24 Feb 2012I can’t see why anyone cares about this, but it’s been getting some press and visualization attention lately – so here ya go:
Here’s an out of focus chart from Time magazine (anyone know why their online graphics always suck? Cutbacks, probably.)
If you want more details, The Atlantic has a paragraph on each coupled with stately portraits:
An interactive version using Tableau:
And yes – it’s cold and rainy in DC today – and I’m a little grumpy. Or maybe it’s the thought of any kind of presidential analysis that is depressing me. Barf.
In: Interactive Politics Source: NYT Source: Washington Post Source: WSJ
14 Feb 2012A number of news agencies took a crack at visualizing Obama’s 2013 budget proposal. (If you want to try it yourself, a shocking amount of detailed data is available in spreadsheet form at the OMB website).
Below is the Washington Post’s version. You can click on any box to see a column chart of historical values. It would have been nice to be able to drill down further, but this is a good start:
The NYT created a beautiful animated – ummm – I’m not sure what this is. A dorling diagram? Well, it looks pretty, and it’s slightly more detailed than the WashPost version, but I think the brain processes square area better than circles.
The WSJ posted five charts, but they’re nothing special:
In: Food Politics Source: NYT
11 Feb 2012Originally from PCRM, but I link to the NYT commentary below. Farm subsidies are a joke. Actually, almost all subsidies are a joke, now that I think about it.
Another problem brewing. The world is running out of places to kick the credit can. As usual, there is much insight to be gained from the discussion and comments over at Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture.
In: Innovative Politics
31 Jan 2012The White House released a video of last week’s State of the Union address, with a split screen showing supporting charts, diagrams, and talking points. It’s not a brilliant model of visualization best practices by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a step in the right direction, and represents a recovery from the ridicule that Ross Perot received for using charts on the national political stage in 1992.
For further insight (on both design and economic issues), I HIGHLY RECOMMEND watching this in conjunction with Jodi Beggs critique over at Economists Do it With Models.
In: Politics
25 Jan 2012Anyone have a better idea of how to visualize this data? It feels like there should be one – but maybe sometimes a table is the right tool for the job.
In: Interactive Maps Politics
23 Jan 2012This FT map illustrates just how packed things are at the Persian Gulf’s bottleneck. The designers wisely chose to allow viewers to select which layers of information they wanted to see, and also provided useful related information as popups.
Here is the map with all layers turned on – which obviously would have been a disaster without the interactive filtering.
(note: some FT features require a subscription to view)
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