NOTE: I copied this post over from my MoJo blog. How do you like the new chart bug?
Sometimes raw data can point you in two different directions at once. Take poverty, for example. CBPP has the details here, but the basic story is that over the past half century we've spent a lot of money on social welfare benefits for the poor and it's made a big difference:
Social welfare programs have cut the poverty rate nearly in half, and that's true across the board. It's true for children, for the elderly, and for the working-age population.
On the other hand, if you look at a consistent definition of poverty among our peer countries, things don't look so good:
Both of these charts are true. There's nothing sneaky about either one. But taken together, do they mean we've done pretty well addressing poverty? Or that we've done disgracefully badly? It's your call.
Love seeing Romania outperform Hungary.
We started out in a really bad place. Doing half as badly as we used to means that we're still doing pretty badly.
The second chart is "Workers" so presumably that excludes people who are unemployed or have given up on employment. So while the safety nets seem to be improving, wages aren't.
Also, I think it's wrong to say that social welfare benefits improve poverty rates. They may ameliorate the effects of poverty, but they don't move people out of poverty.
If your point is that only earned income counts toward rising above the poverty level, you should know that millions of working Americans fall below the poverty line. National living wage legislation could ensure that all working people live in dignity.
Ameliorating the effects of poverty is a perfectly good solution for people who are for one reason or another unable to be gainfully employed.
Testing
Chart bug is good - fitting. Might adopt some variant as the favicon to replace the default WordPress 'W'.
As it is right now, you can open a chart (or photo) in a new tab or window to see it at full resolution. This takes two clicks, a right-click to bring up the context menu and a left-click to select the action. It would be nice if there were an Expand icon in the corner of each chart that did it all in a single click.
I'm not really a charts guy but these are significantly more readable than the previous charts on the MJ website.
I'm wondering how happy we should be about having, over the course of many many decades, cut the poverty rate in half?
Not meant as a criticism, just a question.
Read the comments and articles around Barry Ritholtz's column today for good explanations regarding Gamestop.
I'm not sure which column you mean but based on his tweeting I think he might be right that it's a frenzy of poorly educated chumps but I think it's more likely that he's buying into the party line that's being pushed by the financial industry and the political/journalistic elites. From everything that I've seen, the Gamestop situation is a classic short-squeeze where the hudgefunds shorted a stock that was too thinly traded and capalitized and thus left themselves open to being squeezed.
Some kind of regulation might be needed but the idea of doing it now in order to bail out hedge fund guys who stupidly got their balls caught in the wringer seems like a really bad idea. The price of the stock is set by the market which sometimes reflects the fundamentals but which modernly operates much more like a casino. I say let the hedgefunders take the hit and then see about reforming the system.