Posts Tagged ‘economics’
Image courtesy of NPR's Planet Money blog
Do you find charts, graphs and data painful for your eyes? How about your ears? What? Are these numbing nuggets of numbers not singing to you?
Thanks to some plucky reporters at National Public Radio you can now experience the full musical majesty of visual data.
These intrepid audio-detectives decided to investigate the possibility economusic when they faced the problem of trying to describe economic graphs to their listeners.
Take the Case-Schiller Index which measures home prices. Visually it is a good indicator of the “housing boom”. It shows the huge increase in home prices, followed by the huge decrease and subsequent recession … and looks like this.
But what happens when you take those numbers, transpose them onto a musical staff, and get an opera singer to record them?
Well, this.
Also of interest, here’s Miami’s musical representation - the city with one of the biggest booms and busts, and Dallas – a city that saw relatively constant home prices.
We are looking forward to the day when the 1300 pages of the Federal Budget is delivered in song.
iTunes better be ready. Check out the full story here.
Thanks to Calculated Risk
Quick question: What’s your job?
It’s a quick question… and a Big question.
Your job takes up a massive portion of your waking hours and supplies you the income to survive.
So… if you don’t have a job… you’ve got a serious problem (and a lot of time) on your hands.
Right now there are millions of Americans without jobs and recent reports suggest this will not change soon.
The blog Calculated Risk notes the average number unemployed has been at
above 400,000 all year after falling sharply during the last few months of 2010.
What comes up must come down, right? Maybe not, some economists fear.
Recently Justin Weidner and John Williams, of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggested that the natural unemployment rate (i.e. long term level) may have increased from the past rate of 5.0% and that
with a 6.7% natural rate, current and fore-casted levels of unemployment imply that significant labor market slack will persist for several years.
Over at Free Exchange, R.A. things that this study is by no means conclusive but it does
suggest that there has been some rise in the long-term structural rate of unemployment. …the warning in these papers that labour market weakness will persist for some time is not encouraging; the longer workers go without jobs, the less employable they become.
Hey, at least employers don’t discriminate against the unemployed. Wait they do? Well, it can’t get any worse right?
Here at USDemocrazy, we know that happiness can affect our work.
For example, we are a lot happier when our editor is not in the room. Amazingly, we have discovered a fellow who understands happiness of workers like ourselves… …read more.
Thanks to Telegraph.co.uk
We at US Democrazy are proud to announce that two Americans have won the Nobel Prize in Economics! (and no, one of them is not Barack Obama)
So who are these excitingly erudite epic economists?
One was (drum-roll please) Oliver Williamson, of the University of California, Berkeley (standing ovation!).
The other great economist was, well… not an economist at all (okay, now you can sit down). …read more.
