Our old friend Hans Rosling, the Swedish public health statistician whose Gapminder software brings demographic trends vividly to life (previous menions here and here), is back with a new BBC video tracking the health and wealth of nations over two centuries: If you'd like to drill down into the data and watch a particular country's progress or compare two or three countries, the Gapminder file on which this video is based will let you do that. You can also download the software to your own desktop. Amazing stuff, and should give pause to those who are certain the world is going to...

19 December, 2010

Advocates of the Genuine Progress Index argue that traditional measures of our economic health, mainly the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), mislead us by mixing up good spending (on the likes of lobster, turnips, and bicycles) with bad (on oil spills, crime, and car crashes), and because it fails to account for depletion of natural resources. Those critiques, while valid and important, don't completely obviate the relevance of GDP. A new chart from Gapminder (previously mentioned in one of my all-time favorite Contrarian posts), shows that higher GDP per person equals longer life: The trend is unmistakable, and at first glance, the...

04 June, 2010

The Washington Post looks at what happened to the US economy over the last decade: For the first time since the 1930s, no growth in jobs, a decline in household net worth, and falling middle-class earnings. Moneyquote: There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well. Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further...

03 January, 2010

Atlantic Magazine writer James Fallows, drawing on this New York Times op-ed piece, bemoaned the lack of headway in replacing the GDP (gross domestic product) with a GPI (genuine progress indicator) in the years since the Atlantic published this seminal 1995 cover story on the concept. In fact, that Atlantic cover story helped inspire Nova Scotia's Ron Colman to found GPI Atlantic, which has done important work developing measures of real progress in this region. Colman wrote Fallows to point this out, and today Fallows blogs about GPI Atlantic.  [Disclosure: contrarian once worked for GPI Atlantic.]...

12 August, 2009