The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
A New Map Of The U.S., Created By How Our Dollar Bills Move
Using a site that tracks dollar bills, a theoretical physicist noticed that our state boundaries are rather arbitrary, but that money tends to stay within new, more realistic boundaries.
Can we Get Along Without the Penny? This Chart May Help you Decide
Can we get along without the U.S. penny? Reportedly, a majority of Americans think we cannot. We’re just used to it. After all, the penny has been around in one form or another ever since George Washington signed An Act to Provide for a Copper Coinage in 1792.
Let me get to my point. While this chart works wonders on a blog, it doesn’t work on the printed page. There are too many colors, and it’s hard to see which line refers to which recession, especially if the printed page is grayscale.
Today’s ranking of the world’s richest people
The U.S. suffers from staggering economic inequality — as staggering, in some places, as Nigeria, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Richard Florida ran the numbers and compared cities in the U.S. to highly unequal foreign countries. That colorful map might look pretty, but its implications for U.S. income inequality are not.
Most expensive places to rent an apartment in the DC area. I’m moving to Chantilly now. Eww jk.
How The Poor, The Middle Class And The Rich Spend Their Money
How do Americans spend their money? And how do budgets change across the income spectrum?
The graph below answers these questions. It shows average household spending patterns for U.S. households in three income categories — one just below the poverty line, one at the middle of the income distribution and one at the top of the distribution.
ABC, NBC Evening News Shows Ignore Massive Banking Scandal For More Than A Month
American television news outlets continue to devote sparse time to one of largest banking scandals in history. The controversy over whether major banks have been manipulating the LIBOR, a crucial interest rate that banks use to borrow money from one another, has been gathering steam for more than a month since U.S. and U.K. regulators fined British bank Barclays $450 million for its role in trying to rig the rate.
Money as You Grow, developed by the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability, provides 20 essential, age-appropriate financial lessons—with corresponding activities—that kids need to know as they grow. Written in down-to-earth language for children and their families, Money as You Grow will help equip kids with the knowledge they need to live fiscally fit lives. The lessons in Money as You Grow are based on more than a year of research, and drawn from dozens of standards, curricula, and academic studies.
Are Connectedness and Transparency the Key to Recovery?
The Guardian’s Datastore recently announced the results of the economic recovery visualization competition they ran with Google. We’re going to highlight a different competition entry every Wednesday for the next few weeks. Today’s entry, “Are Connectedness and Transparency the Key to Recovery?” by Ryan Panchadsaram, was chosen as the winner of the competition.
On the Guardian’s Datablog:
The Libor rate submissions by each bank, 2005 to 2008 | Interactive guideFollowing the Barclays Libor scandal, we have the data for each bank’s submissions to the rate for each day as the markets spun into crisis
Check out Barclays lobbying profile on Sunlight’s Influence Explorer.
Economic Mobility Across Generations in the USA
The Great Recession notwithstanding, can you still bootstrap yourway to success in America? After all, America is built on the idea of equal opportunity, regardless of economic status at birth. If you work hard enough, even if you were born in poverty, you too can be rich.
Nationally, the U.S. unemployment is high, but that story is wildly different across each state. Whereas Nevada’s unemployment rate is 12%, Nebraska’s—an equally-sized state—is only 4%. The Guardian’s
John Burn-Murdoch*Joe Mako plotted the difference between each state’s unemployment and the national average to highlight the dispersion of joblessness across the U.S.Not all recessions are the same, however. Each recession affects specific sectors and, therefore, specific states. The recession in the early 80s limited the money supply, so farmers and ranchers had less funds. West Virginia, Alabama, and even Iowa and Wyoming had higher-than-average unemployment rates. The most recent recession which boiled-up through a hot real estate market pushed Nevada’s—who had the largest housing boom—unemployment rate far above the national average.
*No, he isn’t a maniacally evil offspring of Rupert Murdoch and Montgomery Burns.
U.S. exceptionalism and billionaires
Ryan McCarthy linked to a post by Ruchir Sharma running on Ezra Klein’s blog analyzing global billionaires.
It has an accompanying chart, which fails our self-sufficiency test. That test involves erasing raw data from a chart, and figuring out how much information the graphical elements themselves convey.
