One simple - too simple? - graph to explain US economy's performance

The graph comes from Thomson Datastream via Derek Thompson of TheAtlantic.com - and it shows that the US economy's performance over the last five years was better than that of comparable developed countries: a shallower recession with a faster recovery. Thompson attributes this performance to the facts that:

(a) control our own currency and (b) used aggressive monetary policy to save the banks and lower interest rates while running high deficits.

Do you agree? What's your interpretation of the graph?

More charts illustrating high American health costs

Here's a link to another useful set of charts about the high costs of the American health care system. (You can see a previous post on this topic here.) This one shows prices in the US for various drugs, diagnostic tests, and procedures - like an appendectomy, illustrated in the screenshot  - compared with other countries. Guess what? Every single one of them is highest in the US, by a lot. This Atlantic.com column by Derek Thompson offers the beginnings of an explanation:

Why is American health care so expensive? Books could be written about this topic. And books have been written about this topic. In The Healing of America, T. D. Reid explored why American medicine falls behind other countries in quality while it races far ahead in cost of care.

Near the end of the book, Reid expands on two big reasons why U.S. health care is so expensive: (1) Unlike other countries, the U.S. government doesn't manage prices; and (2) the complications created by our for-profit system adds tremendous costs.

Soda consumption in one graph

Now that New York City's regulations on the sale of large sodas are close to coming into effect, here's a graph showing an interesting convergence: coffee sales and soda sales are coming close, it lease in terms of revenue. (Note that it doesn't show anything about amounts consumed.) It's from Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. He goes on to point out that part of the explanation is that coffee costs more, but another is that we really are starting to substitute water or sports drinks for soda. Read the column - it's a good one. And let me know if you find consumption data anywhere.

Internet advertising

That chart, from Derek Thompson's blog, shows opportunity for building mobile advertising. But blasting advertising at users on their mobile devices - or their Facebook pages - may not be the best approach. According to this post at the Harvard Business Review's blog, it's a myth to think that consumers want relationships with brands, and another myth to assume that more interactions are better. I certainly don't want to keep hearing from merchants - I have a separate email account that sits and collects emails from various merchants; I dump them out occasionally but almost never read them. As HBR puts it,

[the] relationship flattens much more quickly than most marketers think; soon, helpful interactions become an overwhelming torrent. Without realizing it, many marketers are only adding to the information bombardment consumers feel as they shop a category, reducing stickiness rather than enhancing it.

Perhaps that's why this article in the NY Times, about someone who, as a joke, liked a product on Facebook only to find that his joke had been turned into an ad, resonated so much. The article is on the front page of the print edition.

You can actually limit some of the use Facebook makes of your information. If you don't "like" products or commercial pages, you will never be used in an ad. Second, you can edit your third party ad settings and your social ad settings so that "no one," rather than, "only my friends," can see your name or picture in ads if, as Facebook delicately puts it, "we allow this in the future." To do so, go to Account Settings >Facebook Ads >Ads shown by third parties > Edit third party ad settings, choose "no one" and save changes. Do the same thing with "Ads and Friends."

Oh, and read the full Derek Thompson post. It has a link to a very interesting slideshow discussing Internet trends.

350.org and climate change

Update 1:50 pm: Here's a link to Derek Thompson's blog on theatlantic.com, with charts from Hansen's paper showing areas where temperatures are more than 3 standard deviations above recorded normals. There's no question that it's human caused global warming.

Yesterday's New York Times had an Op-Ed by James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, arguing that by using tar shale, or tar sands, for fuel, instead of finding other, less damaging energy sources, we make what is now a risk of of keeping earth's carbon concentrations below 550 ppm (parts per million) a certainty. (Hansen addresses tar shale in the US and Canada, though there are also tar sands in Venezuela.) It's a depressing prediction, and one worth thinking about.

As Hansen points out, we are already seeing extreme weather events caused by our heating planet. The photo at the top, from Climate Central, shows waterspouts (essentially tornadoes over water) in the Gulf of Mexico off of Louisiana on May 9th, 2012. You can see more at the Climate Central's website, here.

But there are some grounds for at least minimal hope. The author Bill McKibben and a team of 'university friends' has started a website called 350.org intended to build grassroots understanding of the need to reduce the carbon concentration to, you guessed it, 350ppm. Here's their introductory video:

And I know it's behind a paywall, but this New Yorker article by David Owen about a search for an artificial photosynthesis, is interesting, first because of the science (an artificial leaf) and second because of the approach (limiting the increase in energy needs of developing countries while bringing up the standard of living, instead of focusing only decreasing demand in developed countries).

Jobs data the reader can experiment with

The Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institution has developed an interactive graph that shows how long it will take to eliminate the jobs gap (how many jobs it will take to employ the people looking for work and entering the jobs market at pre-recession levels) if the economy adds jobs at different rates. Here's a screenshot:

If you click on this link you can go to the page itself and see what happens if you plug in different numbers (of new jobs per month). It's pretty scary. More on the implications from Derek Thompson of The Atlantic.com, where I found the chart, here.