Utopia, you are standing in it!

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”, famously remarked John Kenneth Galbraith. “Professional” fortune tellers and clairvoyant have accompanied mankind, receiving great respect, throughout the ages. Therefore, one can say, it was only a matter of time also for a “professional” economic soothsaying to emerge, especially in the shadow of a galloping American Capitalism.
In 1899, an astrologer Evangeline Adams moved her business from Boston to New York, a city full of her most lucrative and reliable clients: investors in securities and businessmen. Over the next thirty years, many New Yorkers sought Adams’s advice on market trends, anxious for any insight that might help them evade the ravages of economic turbulence. Even in her own time, many regarded Adams as a fraud and scam artist, but that did not stop her to assert she predicted the stock market crash of 1929.
Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s…

Today is Mother’s Day in the United States, and that means flowers and cards for mom. Or if you’re my mom it means a data viz project!

Mother’s Day actually has a pretty interesting history. Its original founder boycotted the event and never had kids of her own. Curious about where it all came from? Read on!

Google Ngram Viewer scans books and magazines for the phrase you enter and depicts its prevalence over time.

Want more data visualization? Check out my other posts at: https://vizthis.wordpress.com/

No, that isn’t a statistic from South Korea or China.  It is New Zealand in 1963.

My in-laws live in Waihi and whenever we are up there I point out to the children the old television factory, just off the main road, and give them a little reminder about the bad old days when New Zealand destroyed value by manufacturing and assembling television sets.  Somehow I must have been under the impression that there was just one television manufacturing factory in New Zealand.

But browsing in a second-hand bookshop the other day, I stumbled on Electric Household Durable Goods: Economic Aspects of their Manufacture in New Zealand, an NZIER Research Paper published in 1965.  There is 15o pages of analysis, statistics and discussion –  not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it fascinating.

It doesn’t just have information on manufacturing.  There is an interesting reminder of just how many…

by Thomas Cooley, Ben Griffy and Peter Rupert

Eurostat released estimates of first quarter GDP for the Eurozone a little over a week ago (here), showing modest growth of 0.5% for the more inclusive measure of European countries. This is the 12th quarter in a row that the Eurozone has exhibited positive growth after suffering nearly two years of negative growth 2011-2013. The truth is, however, that the Eurozone has only barely recovered to its pre-recession levels. Furthermore, this growth has been driven by core economies, with countries on the periphery still years away from a full recovery.

As usual, disaggregated data is not yet available for all countries from Eurostat. As we see from the most recent set of available data, a number of countries have recovered beyond their 2008 peaks:

Notably, the large economies of the UK, France (and Germany, though we don’t have the data) are pulling…

According to Economic Freedom of the World, there are five major factors that determine a nation’s economic performance.

Here’s the recipe for growth and prosperity.

• Rule of law and property rights.
• Small government.
• Stable monetary policy.
• Reasonable regulatory policy.
• Free trade.

This great publication is the first thing I check when I want to see whether a country leans in the direction of markets or whether it is burdened by a lot of statism. And it allows for meaningful comparisons between nations since it relies on global data sources.

But not all economic variables have good data sources that allow apples-to-apples comparisons. It’s very difficult to measure the degree to which various governments interfere with the price system by imposing controls (either minimum or maximum price limits).

Identifying the degree of cronyism in an economy also is a challenge since there are not reliable numbers for the degree…

By Anton Lang ~

Pretend you are in the market for a new car. The salesman tells you it is the latest technology, brand new, and will do everything your old car did, only much better. Believing what he says, you go ahead and purchase this new car. When you get it home and start using it, you find that your new car starts up okay, but not every time. Once it does start, you then find it will only get you to your destination one time in four, or at best, one time in three. You have no idea when it will stop, or, having just stopped, when it will start up again. True, while it is running, it does all your old car did, only now, you don’t know when it actually will be running for long enough to complete your journey. You ask the salesman about the…

New Zealand recently voted to retain its current flag. Therese Arseneau and Nigel S. Roberts, who examined last year’s first flag plebiscite, now assess aspects of the results of the country’s binding run-off referendum that was held in March.

Three months ago we examined the lead-up to, and the results of, the first of two referendums about New Zealand’s flag. In a postal ballot using optional preferential voting, New Zealanders were asked to choose (from among five options) their preferred alternative flag design. Their choice – the Kyle Lockwood black-white-and-blue silver fern flag – was pitted against the current New Zealand flag in a second binding referendum that was held from 3-24 March and was a postal ballot.

The voting paper for the second referendum on the New Zealand flag (click to enlarge)

We ended our article with a prediction of sorts: as political scientists we would be ‘surprised’…

To celebrate the 71st anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies in May 1945, here’s how the Communist Party of Australia’s Tribune celebrated the victory, compared with the reporting of the victory by the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Daily Worker.