The EPI chart showing productivity Notes, says "less depreciation".
A couple of things.
A. We distinguish between Variable Cost productivity (direct materials, Unit labor) from Capital (asset, investment),productivity.
B. Less depreciation would diminish Capex productivity, which improves a factory or lines output efficiency. Like an Investment in more efficient heat transfer, or 20% capacity increase at 5% of initial $Rev/$capex^1.
Additionally, businesses don't capitalize all assets and all capital productivity. They take it as a current period expense. The auto industry would capitalize and depreciate the infrastructure of an auto plant. But they would current period expense Tooling. A few billion in fact.
Great lessons on being a CharSkeptic <<< available freely to use
On chart 4 (Political Compass) - the original Political Compass website has a deeply flawed methodology, being created by a pair of left-wingers with poor understanding of what conservatives actually believe. So the questionnaire pits participants with sincere versions of left-wing ideas versus straw-man versions of their right-wing counterparts. So obviously it places everyone on the left.
Small nit on the chart of the century. I have never actually seen someone frame government involvement in college as public vs private. It is the easy availability of government-backed student loans lets colleges raise prices more than they could if the loans were more discriminatory on who would repay them.
I would take exception with one criticism of the native vs. foreign worker chart. The dual axes make sense if the idea is to point out the possibility that native workers are being directly replaced by foreign ones. That’s not true in the sense of foreigners showing up at a workplace and kicking out the natives but is accurate in the sense that retirees leaving the labor force are proportionally more native than the workers replacing them. If the chart had used a single x-axis that said “change in the number of workers, it would have looked very similar and given the same impression
“. . . the case of the elephant graph shows another big pitfall when interpreting viral charts: the instinct to fit charts to a desired political narrative.”
There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. -- Mark Twain
It would be nice to re-make the Perry chart "correctly" -- with the Average Hourly Wages in it's own color, and everything above labeled "more expensive" and everything below labeled "more affordable" and then also correcting the College Tuition and Fees to be what is actually spent vs. sticker price. I tried to find his data tables and failed, and am not super interested in re-creating them from the raw BLS data, but it sure would be nice if someone did. Hint hint. :)
My problem with the Drutman chart is that it must be very sensitive to arbitrary choices about which issues you use to measure social liberalism/conservatism. I don't think you can assume that people who support tough measures against crime and illegal immigration are exactly the same people who oppose abortion and gay marriage, although there's probably a lot of overlap.
Yes, this simple 2 dimension chart is almost always misleading. Although people have views that do correlate across issues, I seriously doubt (from talking with both conservatives and liberals of varying degrees) that there is a simple measure of views on either economic or social issues.
The political compass one should read “lower _right_ quadrant” fyi.
The EPI chart showing productivity Notes, says "less depreciation".
A couple of things.
A. We distinguish between Variable Cost productivity (direct materials, Unit labor) from Capital (asset, investment),productivity.
B. Less depreciation would diminish Capex productivity, which improves a factory or lines output efficiency. Like an Investment in more efficient heat transfer, or 20% capacity increase at 5% of initial $Rev/$capex^1.
Additionally, businesses don't capitalize all assets and all capital productivity. They take it as a current period expense. The auto industry would capitalize and depreciate the infrastructure of an auto plant. But they would current period expense Tooling. A few billion in fact.
Great lessons on being a CharSkeptic <<< available freely to use
Yep. The original versions of the chart didn't net out depreciation, and people complained, so EPI netted it out in their own.
Awesome!
On chart 4 (Political Compass) - the original Political Compass website has a deeply flawed methodology, being created by a pair of left-wingers with poor understanding of what conservatives actually believe. So the questionnaire pits participants with sincere versions of left-wing ideas versus straw-man versions of their right-wing counterparts. So obviously it places everyone on the left.
Great post! Looking at Example 1 -- housing has gone up _less_ than wages since 2000???
Small nit on the chart of the century. I have never actually seen someone frame government involvement in college as public vs private. It is the easy availability of government-backed student loans lets colleges raise prices more than they could if the loans were more discriminatory on who would repay them.
I would take exception with one criticism of the native vs. foreign worker chart. The dual axes make sense if the idea is to point out the possibility that native workers are being directly replaced by foreign ones. That’s not true in the sense of foreigners showing up at a workplace and kicking out the natives but is accurate in the sense that retirees leaving the labor force are proportionally more native than the workers replacing them. If the chart had used a single x-axis that said “change in the number of workers, it would have looked very similar and given the same impression
“. . . the case of the elephant graph shows another big pitfall when interpreting viral charts: the instinct to fit charts to a desired political narrative.”
There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. -- Mark Twain
It would be nice to re-make the Perry chart "correctly" -- with the Average Hourly Wages in it's own color, and everything above labeled "more expensive" and everything below labeled "more affordable" and then also correcting the College Tuition and Fees to be what is actually spent vs. sticker price. I tried to find his data tables and failed, and am not super interested in re-creating them from the raw BLS data, but it sure would be nice if someone did. Hint hint. :)
My problem with the Drutman chart is that it must be very sensitive to arbitrary choices about which issues you use to measure social liberalism/conservatism. I don't think you can assume that people who support tough measures against crime and illegal immigration are exactly the same people who oppose abortion and gay marriage, although there's probably a lot of overlap.
Yes, this simple 2 dimension chart is almost always misleading. Although people have views that do correlate across issues, I seriously doubt (from talking with both conservatives and liberals of varying degrees) that there is a simple measure of views on either economic or social issues.