Here is a wonderful concept by David McCandless: Make a visual impression of what all those billion’s of dollars discussed in the press, and put the pictures side by side to get a sense of perspective. Then animate it and hum the tetris soundtrack (you may have to do that yourself) and see what the $3bn OPEC climate change fund looks like, how big the national debt interest payments are and what the crisis really cost… Kudos.
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.
It seems that there is bad news around every corner, but there is a shimmer of light if one has a look at some development statistics for the last 30 years. At least the ones presented by William Easterly seem to indicate some real progress over the last many years:
Really?
This seems to indicate two things: development economists know what they are doing and life, globally, has been getting better over the last thirty years: To the former Easterly responds “One group that doesn’t deserve much credit is “development experts,” because there is a terrible crisis of confidence in development economics now, where we all freely confess we don’t really know what to advise governments on how to speed up development.” … The question then remains whether the beautifully logged series are representative of real change or just creative statistics… Any thoughts?
