voluntaryXchange

It’s That Time of Year

I was old enough, and we had the news on in my house enough, to be cognizant of the loss of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.

In the fevered imaginings of an 11 year old, the complete disappearance of the ship (its wreckage was found only after a few days) was yet more evidence of Bermuda Triangle-like anomalies.

This infographic is timely:

Various authors have used pretty much all of these to explain the disaster.

Infographic: The World’s Money and Markets

This is good but not great. (All my comments are up here because the image is so large, here is the original in its own web page with comments). I have 3 big complaints. There’s also a fourth group of stuff to love because we don’t often see it elsewhere.

• There’s some crossover between different categories, so some things are double-counted. Some examples are:
• Several of the “Biggest Companies” biggest shareholders are listed in the “50 Richest People”.
• The “Fed’s Balance Sheet” includes the USA sub-category under “Currency”. And BTW: which side of the Fed’s balance sheet is shown there, or is it both (or do the visualizers not have that straight in their own heads?)
• There’s some mixing of stocks and flows. For example:
• The category “50 Richest People” (in the world) is followed by “California’s GDP”. But the former is a stock and the latter is a flow. A way to think about this is that they are related by a rate of return. Assume that’s 10%/year to make things simple. Thus, the flow of income coming of the wealth of the 50 richest people is about 2 blocks. When compared to the flow of California’s GDP of 26 blocks (yes, there’s a mistake in the chart there) it doesn’t look so big. Even better, California’s flow of GDP is generated by a stock of wealth that’s 10 times as big, so an appropriate comparison is the 19 blocks for the “50 Richest People” to the 260 blocks of wealth in California.
• But that comparison is insightful because the size of the sub-category “United States” under “Stock Markets” is only 73 blocks. Figure about 10 of those are in California. So somehow, California has 260 blocks of wealth of which just 10 are the market’s net worth of corporations. This tells us that most of what is productive in our world is not in corporations, which begs the question of why on earth so many politicians are so concerned with limiting them.
• They need to be careful about what are assets, what the liabilities are, and what net worth (the difference between the two) is. For example:
• They only have some portions of assets listed (e.g., “Gold”, “Currency”) but then they show a much more inclusive and comprehensive “Global Debt” category. This makes debt look too large.
• They also show capitalization of “Stock Markets” which is a net figure. What are the assets and liabilities associated with that?
• The same thing goes for derivatives. They talk about the zero-sum nature of most of those, but they don’t actually show it.
• This is a good example of the “balanced reporting” and “what passes for expertise” problems from my Why Is Macro So Hard lectures. In the sidebar about derivatives, they quote Dr. Richard Sandor (why does he get a title if it isn’t important to the position he takes?), Warren Buffet, and Jeff Greene. So what you have there is a guy who markets derivatives, a guy who’s rich mostly from non-derivatives, and a guy who got rich from derivatives. Any expertise there on the history of derivatives, why we have them, or why they’re useful??
• Most people who are buggy about money being backed by something think it has to be gold (in Fort Knox!!). The sub-category “Central Banks & IMF” shows how small that component actually is.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist, via Newmark’s Door.

InfoVideo: Best-Selling Musical Acts

This is a lot of fun:

For my part, the video moves a tad to fast. Even so, it’s almost 10 minutes long. But I was mesmerized the whole time.

The big takeaway is the movement away from bands towards single artists, starting with the video craze in the 80’s.

I’m also surprised at the star power of some people. I kind of wonder what the trick is to someone like Madonna or Prince: they continue to make sales between albums when others taper off. Better marketing I’m sure, but I wonder what that is.

I also wonder if workers in record stores notice this. I mean, Hotel California was huge in the late 1970’s. Was this like every third sale or something like that?

And then there are ones that got huge radio play, but don’t really enter the top 10. For example, Robin Thicke is not on there at all. Neither is Los Del Rio.

I was also surprised at the staying power of some of them. The Beatles, of course, are up there for years. But so are Pink Floyd, and Queen.

A lot of this makes me wonder if there’s a lot more albums bought by adult women than I realized. When I look at a lot of the artists on here, especially from like 1985 onwards, I envision the fan as a 25-35 year old woman. That’s not a bad thing, I’m just not getting the teenager vibe from many of the artists.

Via bookofjoe.

Brexit Update

Several weeks back Zero Hedge posted, and I reposted, the excellent Brexit flowchart. Here’s where we are now:

The only trick here is that the EU offered their extension without the UK actually going through with a “No” vote.

Brexit Roadmap

From Statistica via Zero Hedge and Newmark’s Door:

My inclination is to think we’re going down the right side. Again.

Is the Immorality of Wealth Something One Should Even Ask About If They’re Clueless?

So everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, so I applaud Adam Roberts for the short graphic of his views.

But I wish this sort of thing wouldn’t get published on Vox, where it gets lots of views.

Here’s some of the nonsense therein:

• He was born into the top 1% in the U.S., and asserts that this gives him special insight into a need to “change the system”. Adam, all of us are in the top 1% in human history, and most of us are in the top 1% across the world. Your limited scope is problematic: do we need to change those systems too (when they don’t have just one)? If not, his basis for the argument about our system is weak. It borders on being bigoted against our system.
• He got politicized about wealth inequality. Does he understand that wealth is past income from work left unspent? Is it the work he doesn’t like, or the not spending it? It seems like the latter. Except all wealth is spent if it’s not buried somewhere. So what he really doesn’t like is how it’s spent, which is actually OK. But I don’t think he knows this is what he’s saying. Uh oh.
• He also got politicized about climate change, which … as a tragedy of the commons problem … has little to do with his family’s wealth. But, he’s worried about the connections between wealth inequality, climate change, and war … the connections between he assumes but doesn’t explain. Maybe it’s just his faith.
• He’s worried that his family money came from the oil, banking, and military industries. Fair enough. Are there industries that could have been the source of his money that he would have been OK with (and not motivated to publish his comic)? If not, then why mention those three? Oh yeah, that thing Trump gets accused of … dog whistling. I guess it’s OK in the right cause.
• Speaking of which … is the phrase “extract more and more profit for the sake of a wealthy few” supposed to be neutral? BTW: once you realize that both consumers and producers get surplus, but only producer surplus is tagged with the black hat name of profit, you start to wonder about the bias of people against market mechanisms.
• How about “leaving most people overworked and struggling”? Are they really? Has he ever been outside the developed world: those people are overworked and struggling. I freely admit to claiming to be overworked and struggling, and I’d like to work less and be more comfortable, but I’m realistic that whatever my situation it’s just not that bad.
• He asserts that yachts are a bad thing. Ummm … he should revisit why George Mitchell left the Senate. Yachts are a good thing, in a small way, to a whole multitude or people.
• Ummm … his coworker (and presumably kindred spirit) Jes has more money in the bank than I do, and I don’t see it their way. WTF?
• His activist friends want him to give it all away. Fair enough. Change the ownership of the wealth that already exists. Does that mean it will be spent in a better way? If you’re not sure, then why say it?
• He asks “Is it moral to hold on to any excess private wealth under capitalism? What if it’s not excess? What if it’s not private? What if one doesn’t live under capitalism? His words make me wonder if Putin’s dacha is a form of wealth he’d be OK with.
• He asks if it matters where wealth came from. He lists four choices. Fossil fuels is one. I can imagine what his answer might be, but I wonder if he’d be happier if the source was other forms of energy with higher margins or subsidies? He also lists “invented something useful”. Last I checked, most of the value of good inventions is stolen by its users. Is that OK? He also lists “medical doctor”. Does he know the AMA is a monopoly that allows doctors to charge a markup over marginal cost that others can’t? And he lists “Made it off stocks”. Do you think he means investing in firms that make workers more productive, increasing their wages? My guess is that he’s on the wrong side of all of these.
• Of course … more dog whistles … “land stolen from indigenous peoples”, and reparations. ‘Nuff said.
• Every billionaire is a policy failure is a pretty popular meme this year. Well, he seems OK with using the state’s monopoly on violence to address that. Last I checked, there’s an awful lot of governments at the federal, state, county, municipal, local, school district, utility board level and so on that would qualify as billionaires if we bothered to label them that way. Who’s to say they behave better?

In the end, I agree with his final sentiment “A world that’s better for all of us … is better for all of us.”. But I don’t start my understanding of that by putting white hats on stuff I like and black hats on stuff I don’t. Then again, I have this funny thing I do called thinking.

Its Evidence of Poor Teaching ;-D

Carpe Diem notes that Monday is National Grammar Day, and shows some evidence from basic Google searches. I’ll go one better and show Google Ngrams. Not every one of Mark Perry’s searches shows up, but some do.

Exhibit B: A Google search finds more than 17,000,000 results for the incorrect phrase “at it’s best.”

Here’s my Google Ngram take on that:

Exhibit C: A Google search for the incorrect phrase “it’s fullest” finds more than 700,000 results.

Surprisingly, that one was popular way back when, but it is on the increase of late:

Exhibit D: Do a Google search for “in it’s own right,” and you’ll also get more than 900,000 results.

All of these are generally on the rise since 1960, and after a little dip in the 80’s, most have increased drastically since then.

Do note that these ngrams are shown in percentages of words/phrases used, so they are scaled for increases in publications.

I suggest that this is prima facie evidence that our grammar has gotten worse, and further that the temporal correlation across all three shows that this is a society-wide breakdown in the teaching of grammar.

Fun for Hours (well … minutes)

A sortable infographic about “Wikipedia’s Lamest Edit Wars”. Here’s one view:

From Information Is Beautiful.

Via bookofjoe.

Fascinating Oil and Gas Maps

The Washington Post ran a cool article with several maps and interactive graphics on oil and gas production in the U.S.

You need to click through to do it justice.

But, here’s an exampls of what you’ll find.

This is not a true nighttime image of North America. Instead, it’s an image in which the wavelengths of oil and gas well flares have been accentuated, so you can see the major production areas: Alberta’s oil sands, the Bakken shale region, the Permian Basin, the Eagle Ford shale region, and the Marcellus shale region. Mexico’s wells also show up at the bottom right.

Via bookofjoe.

Technorati Tags: oil,gas,well,production,interactive,graphics

Very Cool Infographic (About Causes of Death)

From Flowingdata, here’s “How You Will Die”. Morbid, I know.

But, you must click through to this page.

Here’s a screen capture for me:

What you do is put in your sex, race, and age. Then the gray box is like a big sample: the graphic then fires of colored lights as hypothetical people pass away.

 

In my case, about half the white males my age will be gone within 24 years, mostly to circulatory problems and cancer.

 

Via bookofjoe.

 

Technorati Tags: flowingdata,causes,death