voluntaryXchange

Lest We Forget

It’s distasteful, but here’s an informative infographic (circa 1931!) showing lynchings by county in the U.S.

Here is a much larger original.

I learned a few things from this.

First, lynchings were a country-wide phenomenon. There’s a only a handful of states in the northeast that didn’t have any. That also makes me wonder about whether they were reported properly there. Stuff like 8 lynchings in Montana (!!!) is really shocking. When you see that you wonder if it was a message to blacks to just not even go to that state?

Second, lynchings definitely follow state borders, indicating that this was a self-enforcement issue. In particular, Alabama, in the heart of the old South has fewer lynchings than Georgia or Mississippi. To me this suggests that the state authorities in Alabama were more likely to prosecute those involved.

Third, there are also county-level effects. Many counties are clusters of lynchings, while their neighboring counties show few or no lynchings. The “black belt” still exists, and was much denser then, but it isn’t immediately obvious on this map.

Via Ptak Science Books.

Technorati Tags: lynching,county

Rich Blocks Poor Blocks

JT sent a link to the site Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks. It’s a mashup of 1) Google maps, 2) census tract borders, and 3) median income statistics – all presented as a chloropleth.

It’s an interesting idea, and a great start, but I think it’s of limited usefulness in its current fineness.

I looked over the places I’ve lived: 4 in the Buffalo suburbs, 2 in Tuscaloosa, 1 in Salt Lake City, 2 in New Orleans, and 1 in Cedar City (comprising 9 different census tracts).

What I found was that only 5 of those tracts were homogenous enough to be representative of where I lived. The rest are too large geographically, with borders determined by convenience rather than reality. Perhaps they ought to ask the people going door-to-door where one neighborhood ends, and another begins, instead of telling them from a windowless office somewhere in the D.C. metro area.

One interesting thing I did find is that, apparently I’ve always chosen neighborhoods where my income was well above the median. I’m not sure what that says about me though.

Technorati Tags: rich,blocks,poor,median,income,census,tract

Federal Budget Infographic

Here’s a tremendous infographic from The New York Times. It shows the 2011 (and 2010) federal budgets.

The entire set of budget outlays is laid out in blocks. The cabinet level spending amounts are in big rectangles, and the subdivisions of those are the smaller rectangles on the inside.

What I don’t like about this graph is the emphasis. To me, the primary factor is which spending accounts can actually be cut. It is secondary whether programs have gotten bigger or smaller; what good is it to know that something has gotten bigger when you can’t cut it if you want to.

So, for me, the primary thing to look at is found by clicking on the “Hide Mandatory Spending” button. Click that, and most of the chart goes white. This shows that most of the budget is actually untouchable. Click it again, and it all comes back.

Personally, I don’t like the default coloring. It shows which programs are growing (greener) and which are getting smaller (pinker or even marooner). When you click on the button to show the 2010 budget, the shading goes away. Click back on the 2011 budget button, and the shading does accentuate the blocks that have changed. Cool, but this is of secondary importance.

Technorati Tags: 2011,federal,budget,infographic,mandatory,spending

European Debt and GDP Infographic

This graphic is easy to figure out, but the colors bug me (click it to enlarge).

Countries are ordered from smallest to largest, with the blue square indicating the size of the countries GDP.

The countries debt/GDP ratio* is then plotted as a red square, who’s area is the country’s ratio times its GDP. Orange blocks indicate countries who’s debt/GDP ratio exceeds 100%.

This does a good job of highlighting why Greece and Italy are problems. Portugal too. It’s not so good on Ireland (which has gotten better), Spain (which has also gotten better, but not that much), and Belgium (which isn’t really on anyone’s radar screen yet).

Belgium is an interesting story. Maybe they should be a problem that people talk about. But they’ve had an interesting problem: they have a parliamentary government, had an election, no one could form a majority coalition, and they went without a ruling party for almost 2 years. This makes me wonder if no one is worried about Belgium because there was no Belgian government to whine about how awful things were. That’s a scary thought.

* The debt/GDP ratio is a popular, but problematic, measure. National debt is like the balance on your credit card or mortgage. GDP is like the size of your paycheck. You’d never compare the two for a household because the one is a stock variable and the other is a flow variable. For example, my debt/GDP ratio is much higher than the typical student’s because I have a mortgage on a house big enough for a family. It’s better to do a stock to a stock comparison (like debt to assets on a balance sheet) or a flow to a flow as on income statements (like debt payments to GDP). If you dig through the news, the details are always about Greece’s or Italy’s debt payments that are coming due.

By Severino, via Information Is Beautiful.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: eurozone,debt,gdp

Fun with The Eurozone Bubbles

This tool is more fun than informative. It shows every country in the Eurozone as a “water balloon”, and the Eurozone itself as a box. Bigger bubbles indicate countries with more debt for their size.

When you push the small water balloons with your mouse, not much happens. Now try pushing Greece.

Via Information Is Beautiful.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: eurozone,bubble,greece,italy,pigs

Why Rounded Corners Are Better

UXMovement:

… The sharper the corner, the brighter it seems. And the brighter a corner appears, the more it’ll affect visual processing.

Which object is easier to look at?

The argument then extends to curving “corners” on rectangles. I’m not sure that makes much difference, but I’m sure curious about that.

Via bookofjoe.

FWIW: Contrast this post with the one before it. The video “10 Bullets” advocates knolling: arranging tools on surfaces at right angles. This is advocating something very much like the diagram on the left.

Technorati Tags: rounded,curves,corners

Grade Distribution at Cornell

Very cool: the distribution of letter grades by department and course at Cornell. And … it’s interactive.

Cornell is actually going to use this fruitfully: next year every transcript will list the median grade for the course. That will help out vast majority of education majors who got A’s in their classes come back down to earth.

Technorati Tags: grade,distribution,cornell

Netflix vs. Blockbuster†

I’m a psychic: next year’s version of this graphic will detail how Amazon Video On Demand for members of Prime killed Netflix.

The managerial economics story here is that the marginal cost of streaming a movie is zero, and that competition will push the price towards that level. Amazon, with other source of revenue, can handle that. I’m not sure that Netflix can.

Via: Online MBA Programs

† This graphic is sponsored, and was sent to me, but it's a good one!

Technorati Tags: netflix,blockbuster