WSJ up NY Times down

The latest figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations reveal that the Wall Street Journal has become the largest weekday paper in the United States with a week-day circulation of 2.092 million copies. The USA Today came second with 1.83 million copies. The New York Times with 0.95 million week-day copies was third. NY Times, however, continues to dominate the weekend sales.

WSJ was the only large paper that reported an increase in circulation over the past six months. 

The web-based circulation, however, paints a different picture. According to Google data, New York Times  with 4 million daily visitors to its website is far ahead of its rivals.

The decline of the Creative Class

Richard Florida’s pop economics worked well in the boom times. He credited the creative class (any one sitting behind a computer or an easel at work) for bringing us wealth and prosperity.

When the housing prices and CEO compensations were growing, Richard Florida’s theories seemed the answer for all our economic ills. His solution: we should turn the manufacturing and agrarian classes into the creative class; replace shovels with Adobe Photoshops, and you are set for prosperity.

The test of any economic theory or paradigm is it’s ability to withstand a (great) recession. The creative class, it appears, did not fare well during recession in the United States. The map below presents the change in personal income during 2007-08 in the United States. The blue-coloured counties are the ones with highest income gains and the yellow-coloured are the ones with the lowest income gains. Florida’s creative classes are mostly in yellow, with lowest income gains.

Source: http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/lapi/2010/lapi0410.htm

The highest gains were reported for counties with agricultural economic base. After years of declining farm incomes, agri-based counties saw a resurgent in their incomes in 2009. According to BEA:

For the nation, personal income grew 2.9 percent in 2008 after growing 5.5 percent in 2007. A surge in farm income accounted for the bulk of the growth in 29 of the 31 fastest growing counties (the top 1 percent of the nation’s counties) as they continued to rebound from sharp mid-decade declines in farm income…

Personal income is a comprehensive measure of the income of all persons from all sources. In addition to wages and salaries, it includes employer-provided health insurance, dividends and interest income, social security benefits, and other types of income…

Personal income and its components are available for 3,112 counties from 1969 to 2008. In addition, detailed annual estimates of earnings and employment, inflows and outflows of commuters’ earnings, personal current transfer receipts, and farm gross income and expenses by major category for each county are available. A partial sample of the data available is presented in the attached table for New York County, New York. These estimates are the only comprehensive annual measure of economic activity available for counties. Go to www.bea.gov/regional/reis/ to access these estimates.

A narrative describing county, metropolitan area, and state personal income using current estimates, growth rates, and a breakdown of the sources of personal income is available at www.bea.gov/regional/bearfacts/.

Too hot to handle: mortgage arrears in Alberta

The rapid climb in housing prices created the gold rush for real estate in Alberta. Now the economy is no longer roaring, Albertans are left with large mortgages and job uncertainty.

No wonder the mortgage data across Canada shows Alberta to have the highest mortgage arrears across Canada. Following Alberta are the Atlantic provinces in above average mortgage arrears.

World Bank allows access to its data

The World Bank is now allowing access to thousands of datasets, which should help academics and practitioners work with the development data that was restricted to subscribers in the past. The URL for the data initiative is http://data.worldbank.org/.

Hans Rosling makes numbers talk and sing

Hans is a professor of public health who specializes also in data visualization. He has shown how data can inform policy-making.

The following video is a must see for those interested in numbers for decision-making and/or alleviating poverty. Also, you’ll love Hans for his sense-of-humour.

Watch the entire video to see him swallow a sword at the end to make his point:

anything is possible.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html

Fertility rates and Infant mortality

Why households in poor countries have more children? Is it because of religious reasons, i.e., no contraceptives allowed. Or is it because of disease, i.e., high infant  mortality rates due to disease result in parents having a large number of children because the parents are not certain how many children, if at all, will survive.

The following animation presents data from the World Bank that suggests that with a decline in infant mortality rate over time, the fertility rates declined as well. What could also be extrapolated is that with the decline in the incidence of numerous diseases, the infant mortality rates have declined sharply in certain countries. The lag with fertility rates implies that it would take some time for the fertility rates to decline in response to the lower infant mortality rates.

Each bubble in the animation represents a country.

iPad, uPad, we all pad

Is the iPad craze subsiding? A few days after its release one could see that the Internet hype around the product is now settling. The graph below shows a decline in the number of Internet searches conducted on Google for shopping interests.

The regional interest is the highest in the United States followed by Japan, Netherlands, Germany, and Canada. China ranked 9th in the web-interest in the product. Even though Canada’s population is much smaller than that of UK or France, Canadians are more intrigued by iPad even though it is not yet available for sale in Canada.