New School Economic Review

Visualize this

by Benjamin on January 30, 2010

Visualisation is the new vogue in economics – and I think it’s official. I’ve been going on about Hans Rosling, Gapminder and Edward Tufte in the past, and now Rosling’s even been named Foreign Policy’s #96 top global thinker. Going by the top ten, that might not be a very wonderful list to be on, although it has a big chunk of economists in general. But I digress.

Visualisation is the new ‘cool’ thing to do in economics. The World Bank has their own visualiser and has even splurged on direct developer tools and on-line data simulation (called iSimulate, so one might expect the odd R-rated joke, as with the iPad). Both the IMF and even Eurostat has  joined the bandwagon, and the UK government is promoting data visualisation for its civil servants to use in the public sector. This is following a private sector trend, admittedly started by the Gapminder project, which is still – I think – the best of the lot, which explains why Google bought it back in 2007. But google operates their own visualiser straight on the search engine, and the Guardian runs a big data storage and visualisation site, to which David McCandless, of the excellent Information is Beautiful Blog contributes and writes for.

So where does all this visualisation lead? Well… for the moment it is a lot of fun and data can be revealing. That said, it needs to be combined with insight and planning before it will be much use to the day-to-day economist I reckon. Davind McCandless’ new book The Visual Miscallaneum (which I got today) goes a long way to inspire our use of graphics. Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen books on Presentation and Design are good for helping us think about how to present (the first more so than the second I think). But the reality is that for the moment journals print graphs in black and white, with a bare minimum of design scope. And lets be honest, visualising the supply lines and bottlenecks in the confused and complicated Haitian (and similar) aid operations would probably be the most beneficial of all data visualisations – but that’s not being done, not yet at least.

What HIV Epidemic?? Hans Rosling’s back

by Benjamin on August 30, 2009

In June, Hans Rosling (raved about earlier) gave a talk at the US State department explaining that the mindset about developing and developed countries is wrong, and the idea of an African HIV epidemic is wrong… He has a dataset, and if our mindset does not coincide with the dataset, then one of them must be wrong… The talk encompasses historical comparrisons of the US and China, an overview of world incomes and a discussion of the HIV ‘epidemic’  in Africa… Which according to Rosling is not an epidemic, but rather is a

Special situation probably of concurrent secxual partnerships among part of the heterosexual population in some countries or some parts of countries, in South East Africa. Don’t make it Africa, don’t make it a race issue. Make it a local issue.

Below is the State Department talk, but a documentary entitled “Rosling’s World” just aired on Swedish Television (in Swedish with English Subtitles), which will be free to watch until 15 September. I’m off to watch it now.

All in all, this is well worth watching, and I am sure it will provoke some responses.

Let there be stoning… for bad presenters

by Benjamin on July 4, 2009

Isn’t it nice when you’ve been asking for better presentations in conferences and lectures and then suddenly you realise that you are wholly unoriginal and people have been thinking the same thing for 20+ years?

Yes we have PresentationZen and Edward Tufte today, not to mention Hans Rosling and TED, but having just attended two international conferences these last two weeks, there is still a long way to go before we can catch up with Jay H. Lehr’s article “Let there be stoning!” – what an excellent 4 page read.

Lehr, Jay H. 1985. “Let there be Stoning!” Ground Water 23(2): 163-5

Can you see the music?

by Benjamin on February 9, 2009

For those of you who have not yet heard of Hans Rosling, let me introduce a man who single-handedly makes data and statistics exciting, interesting and easy to play with (yes I said play) via the gapminder project. Dr. Rosling in a talk at the OECD a few years back opened by showing the audience something beautiful. He showed Chopin… In fact he put a copy of the notes on the screen, looked at it’s beauty and said:

Few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to listen to the music to understand how beautiful it is. But often that’s how we present statistics; we just show the notes we don’t play the music.

And Hans Rosling Played the music and presented statistics on growth, development, health and everything else in a way which is just fanstastic! Take some time, it’s well worth watching:

“Debunking third world myths, and the best stats you’ve ever seen!”
Fantastic… If you are not excited by stats after this… there’s no hope

 

“New Insights on Poverty and Life around the World”
Stats, graphics, imagery, poverty… Oh yeah, and getting ’serious’ with PowerPoint…

 

“Unveil the Beauty of Statistics”
Quality not as good as the TED talks, but message is right on the spot