When Are Prospective Online Buyers Looking at Homes for Sale?
House Hunting All Day, Every Day is a relatively simple dashboard that reveals when, in terms of weekday and time, most prospective house buyers are looking at homes for sale (on the Trulia website, that is).
Visualizing the Local Effects of Recovery Spending on Job Loss
In the wake of U.S. President Obama’s speech on jobs last night, we present this mapping of Recovery Act spending. Development Seed, the same folks who mapped the famine in the Horn of Africa, have turned their attention on America.
Visualization of the Week: Mapping U.S. Job Losses
The U.S. observed the Labor Day holiday this week, which means pundits and politicians alike were apt to talk about jobs. The news on the jobs front hasn’t been good lately, most recently with a report from the Labor Department indicating no jobs growth and revising figures from earlier months to paint a pretty grim picture for the unemployment rate. That rate now hovers around 9.1%.
Efficiency at work, comparing hours worked to GDP per capita.
(via GOOD.is)
![Visualization Explores the Rent vs. Buy Debate
In these challenging financial times one of the key decisions we are faced with is whether to rent or to buy a house. This appears to be a particularly resonant issue in the US and now Trulia, an agency focused on discovering house-hunting trends and insights, have produced a visualization [insights.truliablog.com] to explore this issue across major US cities. Specifically, they looked to compare the cost of renting against the cost of buying a two-bedroom apartment, condo or townhouse to see which option would work out the most expensive](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lq2vv88xcO1qhn3smo1_1280.jpg)
In these challenging financial times one of the key decisions we are faced with is whether to rent or to buy a house. This appears to be a particularly resonant issue in the US and now Trulia, an agency focused on discovering house-hunting trends and insights, have produced a visualization [insights.truliablog.com] to explore this issue across major US cities. Specifically, they looked to compare the cost of renting against the cost of buying a two-bedroom apartment, condo or townhouse to see which option would work out the most expensive
A Year in the Life of Dow Jones
When the Dow plunged yesterday I was flipping through cable news and couldn’t find anyone, anywhere who would contextualize what the numbers meant.
Yes, 630 plus points (or about 5.5%) were lost from the day before but how did that compare to the year? For that matter, where were we last August?
Enter data gleaned from Wolfram|Alpha. Above is the monthly low, mean and high of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from August 2010 to yesterday.
For those wondering, here’s a flashback of past August lows:
- August 2011: 10810
- August 2010: 9986
- August 2009: 9135
- August 2008: 11284
- August 2007: 12846
- August 2006: 11076
- August 2005: 10397
Now watch as we jump back in time a bit:
- August 1995: 4581
- August 1985: 1313
- August 1975: 791
- August 1925: 125
And all that because the cable wouldn’t tell me that one little thing I wanted to know.
Mapping U.S. Foreign Debt: How Much We Owe and to Whom
Our goal with this visualization was to show which countries are lending us money and to let people interact with data on a country by country basis to see how this lending has changed over time. For example, mousing over the large dot on China shows that Chinese lending to the United States has gone from $59 billion ten years ago to more than $1.15 trillion today, or one quarter of the total foreign owned debt of $4.45 trillion.
Yuma, Arizona, is the most unemployed city in America. With local joblessness at 28%, people with education and experience that once qualified them for middle or upper management positions are finding themselves lucky to even land jobs in fast food.
For a time it seemed safe for many people going about their summers to try to ignore the debt ceiling drama playing out in Washington. If Wall Street had not seemed overly concerned that the United States was headed toward default, why should anyone else worry? And there is the long history of crying wolf in Washington: in April everyone finally got up to speed on the threatened shutdown of the federal government just in time to see it averted by an 11th-hour deal.
Global Economics opener, Issue 30 Illustration by Matt Owens
