This one explains itself…
If you’re looking for more charts of the like, search no further than the Economic Policy Institute‘s The State of Working America. The one above is from their Income & Poverty category, which brings together two things that are supposed to cancel each other out.
As long as employees are considered expenses, as opposed to, say, investments, they will continue to get squeezed rather than appreciated.
Believe it or not, it’s 2012 and there will supposedly be some flying cars around by the end of it. Driverless cars are around the corner too, as are legions of robots. It’s the future, kinda. There’s so much in the works these days it’s difficult to discern what is actually happening and what is just California dreamin’.
If you’re having trouble keeping up, perhaps the Gartner Hype Cycle can help.
To break it down in terms of the news you are used to hearing about new technology, check out the more detailed explanation.
While Gartner gets far more specific about particular industries with its paying clients, once a year they release the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, evaluating the maturity of the entire field of next big things…
Happy trails to all on the road to the Plateau of Productivity…
[All charts from Gartner]
What do you remember from your day to day? Can you recall what you did last year, last month or last week? Nicholas Felton, aka Feltron, knows. No, he doesn’t know what you did, but he knows exactly what he has been up to and since 2005 has shared the results in the Feltron Annual Report.
For more on the subject, we turn to Roman Mars and the 99% Invisible radio show…
Below we have the on-the-ground report of Feltron’s 2008 comings and goings. Open up his Annual Report archive in a new window to explore while you listen…
(click to jump into the 2008 report)
[Feltron.com via 99% Invisible; Thanks, Timothy!]
Got big plans for the weekend? Maybe taking a short trip?
Then, here’s a golden opportunity to put it all in perspective. Click the image to launch a wonderful presentation that will make you feel utterly small and overwhelming gigantic one after the other…
(click image to launch)
[The Scale of the Universe 2 by Cary Huang; Thanks, Andy!]
Yesterday it was a map, today it’s a chart.
The point of this one is to say that, to be part of the world’s richest 1%, all you have to do is make $34,900 a year, after taxes.
That’s per person by household, of course, so if you’ve got a significant other, double it, and if you’ve got a couple of kids, quadruple it. It raises the bar a bit, but the big shocker is: 29 million, or almost half, of the world’s richest 1% are Americans, just like you!
Then there’s some other countries, take a look…
Now, this chart was part of an article on CNNMoney only a month ago, but we are told the data is from 2005. Then you count the little chart people, find only 60, and rightly exclaim, “Hey, we hit 6 billion in 1999.” For 2005, this chart would need four or five more people depending on which way you round it. It might not seem like much or that long of a time, but world GDP went from $40B to $60B in the same period. The question is, how would it change our $34,900 number?
But say you do top that number, then look around your surroundings and rightly exclaim, “Hey, I’m not rich.” Just read the end of the article, silly. We’re talking about the entire world here. The world in which the global median income is $1,225/year. ”In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world.” … That’s where the record skips. If you want to hear some reactions to this conclusion, check out the 1,000+ comments that have piled up. They range from pointing out the differences in cost of living around the world to accusing the writer of trying to take the heat off America’s 1%.
The disconnect is from measuring richness by income, as opposed to wealth. Yes, remember wealth. That’s what you’re missing. Assets. Your life should make sense again as soon as you hear that it takes $500,000 of assets to put you into the richest 1% worldwide.
How many little chart people would the U.S. get in this scenario? 37%, or 22 people. The chart above was only off by 11%, but it completely missed the boat on Japan, which should have 16 people. Anyway, what about the American 1%? How much yearly income does it take to get in that club? Well if you believe CNNMoney, they say it was $343, 927 in 2009, a measly 10 times what they were selling last month.
And before you think they might be trying to show both sides, note that this second article starts out by baiting you with the idea that it would take a million dollar income to be in the top 1%. Surprise, you only need a third of a million! Or, 37 times what the poorest 20% of Americans make on average, 14 times the next, 7.7 times the middle, and 4 times the fourth quintile.
As ThinkProgress would love to explain further, the American 1% owns 40% of the nation’s wealth, including 50% of all U.S. stocks, bonds and mutual funds, and takes home 24% of the nation’s income.
When it comes to world wealth, it looks a lot like yesterday’s map.
And back where we started, the crowd walks away wondering what it was all about anyhow.
[Map from World Institute for Development Economics Research via Gizmag]
Not good with your money? You’re not alone…
(click for full size active clock (loads slow))
Check out the full U.S. Debt Clock for an economic eyeful…
In 2008, two institutions with profoundly unfortunate names were taken over by the federal government. Known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they owned or guaranteed half of the entire U.S. mortgage market at the time and their subsequent rescue represented “one of the most sweeping government interventions in private financial markets”… “in decades”.
Who were the captains of this Titanic? Who let them behind the wheel? Though not the most glamorous of posts, as government-sponsored enterprises, they were unsurprisingly stocked with people who were in the government. Below we have a venn diagram (one from a larger set created by geke.us) showing a selection of people from both sides of the fence equation.
(click for venn diagram collection)
That’s the tip of the iceberg though. Let’s see who on this list comes up in the NNDB Mapper, a very fun tool for mapping the links between people, companies and events ranging from Rihanna to the Funeral of Richard Nixon.
(click for NNDB interactive version)
Okay, we got 6 out of 13. Above we have the connections they share. Now let’s look at everyone associated with Fannie Mae.
(click for NNDB interactive version)
Mainly board members and CEOs. But what happens if we blow out all of their nodes?
(click for NNDB interactive version)
We get a picture. A picture of the myriad influences and connections that led to a spectacular failure.
The End.
[Venn diagram via Infoplasm]
China’s color might be red, but the only reason you hear it mentioned so often these days is because of the green. For all the talk of China though, what do you really know about the country? … Aside from the population, censorship, poor working conditions and growing unrest.
This is obviously a gigantic topic, so we’ll begin by pulling together a few pieces regarding its political structure and leadership:
We start, complexly enough, with a nation of 1.3 billion people. How many are in the Party? 80 million, or a little over 6% of the population. (For comparison, Buddhists are estimated to include 50-80% of the populace, with Taoists around 30%.) What are the perks of being a card carrying member? Better jobs, better schools, and better … wait for it… information!
As the BBC’s chart below shows us, that 80 million boils down very quickly to the 23 men and 1 woman who make up the Politburo, though they go on to say that the real power lies with the 9 members of the standing committee within it.
(click for BBC feature)
The BBC gives summaries on each segment, but the highlights include a National People’s Congress that only meets once a year, party elders who don’t go away, and the State Council, which “sits at the top of a complex bureaucracy of commissions and ministries and is responsible for making sure party policy gets implemented from the national to the local level.”
Or perhaps your eye was drawn to the Discipline Commission, originally established as the Central Control Commission and now officially known as the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Charged with rooting out corruption in the party, you can decide for yourself whether you want to be the fifth person to like them on Facebook.
From there, we go to the names behind all these political bodies via a chart from The International Tibet Network:
(click to enlarge)
Don’t recognize many names? Then try out Drew Conway’s interactive chart below, showing the most connected and critical members of China’s top brass going into 2012.
(click for interactive chart)
This year the fifth generation of Chinese leadership is expected to transition into power, with Xi Jinping likely to replace Hu Jintao as General Secretary and President. While the fifth will be preoccupied with China’s economy, it is speculated that the sixth generation, born in the 1960′s, will be the source of significant political reform after their rise to power in 2022.
As for all the green, the Wall Street Journal is keeping score here: China Econtracker
[Charts from the BBC's How China is Ruled, The International Tibet Network's Chinese-Leaders.org, and Zero Intelligence Agents]
From Mother Jones:
The nation’s 10 largest financial institutions hold 54 percent of our total financial assets; in 1990, they held 20 percent. In the meantime, the number of banks has dropped from more than 12,500 to about 8,000. Some major mergers and acquisitions over the past 20 years:
(click to enlarge)
It might look like a sports bracket, but competition requires competitors and 33 of these players aren’t coming back next season. The object is to best other companies, not eat them.
For a similar look at the investment banking game, see the New York Times’ Wall Street Vanishing Act chart.
When one’s income increases, the tendency would be to expect standard of living to go with it. In the following example, however, once you’re making $10,000 a year, you might feel just as poor making $40,000.
The issue is the balance of subsides and taxes on the lower income brackets. The stagnation comes from the loss of social benefits as income rises. Food stamps turn into grocery bills. Free health insurance turns into… costly health insurance.
One way of looking at the situation, and the one taken by the Mises Institute, which made the chart above, is to say that by helping the poor, we are taking away the motivation to work. And sure, when you find out low-wage work might leave you with less money than being unemployed, where is the motivation? But, what’s the problem here: the helping of the poor or millions of full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to make ends meet? Ape Con Myth’s take on the chart is that the base cost of life for hypothetical families of three in Virginia is about $40k.
But that’s Virginia. What about the country as a whole? Below we have similar charts based on singles and couples at ages 30, 45 and 60 from a Boston University/National Bureau of Economic Research report. Don’t worry about the fine print. Just notice how different they all are…
(click to enlarge)
As the researchers were quick to point out, “the patterns by age and income of marginal net tax rates on earnings, marginal net tax rates on saving, and tax-arbitrage opportunities can be summarized with one word – bizarre.”
What do they think of our chances of understanding the elements at work? “Thanks to the incredible complexity of the U.S. fiscal system, it’s impossible for anyone to understand her incentive to work, save, or contribute to retirement accounts absent highly advanced computer technology and software.”
Try doing that on a computer at a library.
[Mises chart and NBER report via Greg Mankiw via Kottke]
See how the light spread from sea to shining sea…
(click for interactive map)
Those spots of color are papers in different languages. Maybe next someone will make one of these where the holdings of the media conglomerates are shaded in by owner. MediaOwners.com would be a great place to start for such an endeavor. (Or has it already been done? Please comment if you know.)
Meanwhile, you can probably follow some of the dots’ comings and goings by cross-referencing this chart of historical U.S. metropolitan area population rankings.
[Map by Stanford University's Rural West Initiative via visual.ly]
