Income Inequality in Europe

By popular demand (well... one guy asked about it), here is a map of income inequality in Europe.



Just like the map of the US below, this uses the Gini index as a measure of inequality (based on this table). The general pattern seems to be an equitable core comprised of Scandinavia, Germany, France, and Central Europe, with modestly greater inequality towards the Anglophone, Mediterranean, and Slavic peripheries. Turkey (which is mostly in Asia, after all) has the highest Gini score - 43.6. Every other country is less inequitous than every single US state. In fact, the twenty countries with the lowest Ginis in the world are all on this map (except Malta, but only because it's too small to show up).

By the way, the colors in the map above are the same as in the US map from the previous post, but the scale is obviously different. Just for the sake of having an apples-to-apples visualization, this is what it would look like if the same scale were used as on the US map:

Is the US Becoming a Third World Country?

The simplest way to say whether a country is rich or poor is to add up its cumulative wealth, which is usually stated in terms of GDP. Sometimes this number is divided by the number of people in a country to say what the average wealth is: GDP per capita. And for a lot of purposes, including the overall economic strength of a country in an international context, that's a useful definition of wealth. But it's not a sufficient criterion for determining whether a society is wealthy. For instance, it's theoretically possible that a country could have a larger per capita GDP than any other country on the planet, but also for all that wealth to be controlled by a single autocratic leader to whom everyone else is enslaved. In the crudest economic terms, that society could be considered wealthy, even though all but one person would be utterly impoverished. So to determine whether a society is truly wealthy, some account needs to be taken of the distribution of wealth.

Here's a map I made of income inequality in the US.



This map is based on numbers from the US census (pdf). It uses the Gini index to measure income inequality. Gini

indicates how much the income distribution differs from a proportionate distribution (one where everyone would have the same income; for example, 20 percent of the population would hold 20 percent of the income, 40 percent of the population would hold 40 percent of the income, etc.). The Gini index varies from 0 to 1, where 0 indicates perfect equality (a proportional distribution of income), and 1 indicates perfect inequality (where one person has all the income and no one else has any).

So the higher the number, the more wealth inequality there is. For most advanced industrial economies, the Gini number is pretty low. According the the CIA World Factbook (table compiled here), the lowest Gini score in the world is Sweden's, at .23, followed by Denmark and Slovenia at .24. The next 20 countries are all in either Western Europe or the former Communist bloc of Eastern Europe. The EU as a whole is at .307. Russia has the highest number in Europe (.41); Portugal is the highest in Western Europe (.38). Japan is at .381; Australia is .352; Canada is .321.

And then there is the United States, sandwiched between Cote d'Ivoire and Uruguay at .450. Not counting Hong Kong (.523), the US is a complete loner among developed countries. In fact, as you can see from the map above, there is no overlap between any single US state and any other developed country; no state is within the normal range of income distribution in the rest of the developed world. Here's a list of the states with their Gini index numbers, and the country where income distribution is most comparable in parentheses:

Alabama - .472 (Nepal)
Alaska - .417 (Cambodia)
Arizona - .454 (Jamaica)
Arkansas - .460 (Ecuador)
California - .466 (Rwanda)
Colorado - .450 (Uruguay)
Connecticut - .480 (Venezuela)
Delaware - .434 (Guyana)
District of Columbia - .537 (Honduras)
Florida - .467 (Rwanda)
Georgia - .461 (Mexico)
Hawaii - .438 (Nigeria)
Idaho - .421 (Thailand)
Illinois - .462 (Malaysia)
Indiana - .432 (Guyana)
Iowa - .424 (Burundi)
Kansas - .441 (Kenya)
Kentucky - .460 (Ecuador)
Louisiana - .475 (Madagascar)
Maine - .428 (Singapore)
Maryland - .433 (Guyana)
Massachusetts - .461 (Mexico)
Michigan - .444 (Philippines)
Minnesota - .430 (Iran)
Mississippi - .471 (Nepal)
Missouri - .449 (Cote d'Ivoire)
Montana - .426 (Singapore)
Nebraska - .430 (Iran)
Nevada - .434 (Turkey)
New Hampshire - .417 (Cambodia)
New Jersey - .458 (Uganda)
New Mexico - .457 (Uganda)
New York - .495 (Costa Rica)
North Carolina - .458 (Uganda)
North Dakota - .434 (Guyana)
Ohio - .449 (Cote d'Ivoire)
Oklahoma - .460 (Ecuador)
Oregon - .444 (Kenya)
Pennsylvania - .455 (Jamaica)
Rhode Island - .442 (Philippines)
South Carolina - .462 (Mexico)
South Dakota - .439 (Nigeria)
Tennessee - .468 (Rwanda)
Texas - .474 (Mozambique)
Utah - .410 (Russia)
Vermont - .420 (Thailand)
Virginia - .456 (Uganda)
Washington - .443 (Kenya)
West Virginia - .447 (Cameroon)
Wisconsin - .424 (Burundi)
Wyoming - .413 (Senegal)

Obviously, the US is far wealthier than any of the countries to which states are being compared on this list; but it's striking to see the US fit a pattern which, outside of the US, is exclusively a phenomenon of the underdeveloped world.

But does that mean that the US is on the road to Third World-dom? Well, not necessarily - and not yet, at least. But it should give some context to comparisons of wealth between societies. For instance, the GDP per capita in the US is one of the highest in the world. But more of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people, meaning fewer people (relative to that high per capita GDP) are well-off.

Matt Yglesias posted this chart the other day:

So even though a lot of wealth has been created since the 1970s, the typical family isn't much better off. And as Yglesias points out: "Another country with a lower GDP but less inequality could still be a country in which most people are richer than most Americans, and I believe there’s pretty compelling evidence that that’s now the case in a number of European countries."

I would add this: to the extent that wealth matters, it's because wealth increases the well-being of individuals. But there's undeniably a law of diminishing returns: a billionaire is not going to be a thousand times happier than a millionaire just because he has a thousand times as much money. In fact, I would argue that beyond some modest threshold - maybe below an income of $100,000/year - having more money simply doesn't affect one's well-being in any significant way. People certainly desire more wealth, mainly as a positional good - a billionaire has a higher status than a millionaire. But jockeying for positional goods is a zero-sum game; the billionaire's gain is the millionaire's loss, and so overall well-being is not increased by creating more wealth if that wealth just ends up getting shuttled up the income ladder into those stratospheric heights. In other words, if a country becomes wealthier because rich people are getting richer while everyone else treads water, that country is no better off than it was before. And if that's the case for a given country while more wealth is being created in other countries where it isn't being concentrated solely in the hands of the very rich, then that country's well-being, relative to other countries, decreases. That's what's been going on in the US for the last few decades. It's a sign of decline.

But not an irreversible one; the US doesn't have to become a third world country, where the majority of the population struggles to take care of basic needs while a minority controls a huge proportion of the nation's wealth. And an economic crisis, in large part brought about by wealthy elites mishandling their economic power, might be just the thing to start turning the trend around.

Stimulus Job Creation by State

Mint.com has a map of the likely effect of the stimulus bill that was passed a couple weeks ago on the unemployment rates of the states.



Here's their methodology:

we used the White House’s “Job Impact by Congressional District” (which has had its share of criticism for overestimating the new job totals) to determine the total number of new jobs created by state, and then compared those numbers to the total unemployed persons in each state. The result is a hypothetical percentage of each state’s unemployment that will be solved by the stimulus plan, and while of course this number will fluctuate based on upcoming layoffs, it at least gives a picture of how the proposed job creations impact each state’s current unemployment problem.

So the map doesn't depict the reduction in unemployment in absolute terms, but in terms of a percentage of the unemployment rate. That's why states like North Dakota and West Virginia come out looking like big winners, and places like California and the Carolinas not so much: as you'll recall from these maps, the unemployment rate is just much lower in the Plains than in the Southeastern or West Coast states, so the creation of x number of jobs per capita will reduce a greater percentage of those states' unemployed.

An ideal stimulus would cause this whole map to be shaded the same color, or would even disproportionately benefit places with higher unemployment. But as a practical matter, not to mention a political one, it's probably difficult to engage in very precise targeting of the most economically damaged parts of the country. Nonetheless, if these numbers are right, the stimulus really will have gone a long way towards reducing human suffering: no state's unemployment rate is reduced by less than a quarter or so, which means an awful lot of people will avoid perconal catastrophe. (Another debate could be had, of course, on the bill's long-term effects.)

Meanwhile, the gummint has a clickable map that will send you to state websites that describe how stimulus fundds are being spent in each state. Except for North Dakota, where the government does not care about its people.

"Paper Cuts": The Death of the Newspaper Industry

Paper Cuts is tracking the ongoing labor carnage in the newspaper industry in the US. They've got an interactive map with details on newsroom job losses around the country.



The South Florida Sun Sentinel. The Rockingham News. The Washington Post. The Pocono Record. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. These are only some of the papers that have announced layoffs just since Saturday. The combination of the wan economy and the outmoded business model of newspapers has meant disaster for this industry. It looks increasingly like US newspapers in their present form may not be long for this world.

But is that such a bad thing? It would certainly be a terrible thing if journalism didn't survive. But there's surely no chance of that happening - there will always be a demand for journalism. In the future, though, it's likely to be hosted by media other than cheap, inky paper delivered in a bundle to your doorstep. The web is the obvious new venue for journalistic content, and that medium's been growing for years now, of course. But the real interesting test for the future of journalism will be what happens when a major city finds itself without any major newspaper. What will fill the void? My guess is: a proliferation of publications, especially online but in print as well, focused on much narrower niches. This, of course, has been the trend on the internet - the proliferation of micro-focused content venues (ahem) with little or no overheard costs, often motivated by individuals' passions rather than profit. The upshot has been that there's an incredibly richer array of content available to consumers now than there was ten years ago, even as newspapers have declined. (I've just been surfing around for information on Houston's light rail plans, for instance, and I've found way more information than I ever could have by simply waiting around for the paper to show up every day.)

This is the way media content is produced now, and in this context newspapers (like network television) are an anomaly: they offer breadth, not depth, as they rely on serving the interests of a mass audience. But there's nothing especially natural about combining news with sports scores, book reviews, classified ads, real estate listings, comics and all the rest of it, like a typical big-city paper does. The only reason to do so is if the medium that is best suited to distribute lots of information quickly and cheaply does not allow the consumer to exert selective control over content - then an editor has to decide what will appeal to the greatest audience, and deliver it all together in a big bundle. That was the best system for quick and thorough information dispersal during the 20th Century, but it no longer is.

The fact that this anachronistic and quirky medium is unlikely to last much longer in its present form doesn't, as I said, mean the end of journalism. But the questions are, over the long term: will journalism (of the 'serious' investigative sort) become a non-profit enterprise? And are we likely to suffer in the short-term from a lack of established journalistic institutions to act as a watchdog against corporations and government? But of course, for everyone in the industry who are currently suffering from the turbulence of economic and technological change, the questions are much more immediate and personal.

UPDATE: For an interesting and much more comprehensive expression of this general line of thinking, see Steven Berlin Johnson.

(Another) Unemployment Map of the US

Via Matt Yglesias, the Center for American Progress has an interactive map of unemployment and job losses across the fifty states.





It doesn't have the fine-grain data of this unemployment map, but it does have a timeline which allows you to watch the job situation in every state evolve (i.e., deteriorate) over the last four years. And bar graphs for every state, too. Here's Florida:



Brutal - just like the rest of the country, except the Plains, though even there the job losses have started to mount in the past couple of months.

One thing that'll be interesting to watch over the next few years is how the geography of the recession affects population movements. Some places that have been hit especially hard, like Michigan, already had shrinking population shares. But other places that were hit hard by the housing kerblooey had been some of the fastest growing parts of the country - Nevada, Arizona and Florida, especially. Will there be a mass exodus from those states? Meanwhile, the least scathed of the large states so far has been Texas, which was already growing superfast. Will the rate of growth there become even growthier? We shall see.

The G20

The Times Online has a flash map of the participants in the upcoming G20 meeting in London.



The color scheme is as exciting as befits a meeting of heads of state from 20 large economies to discuss things like IMF policy and credit market liquidity. But it has interesting little snippets on what each of the parties wants to get out of the meeting. (To summarize: in the face of the economic crisis, Canada wants the US to do more; the US and Japan want Europe to do more; the UK wants everyone else to do more; Russia wants to hang out with the US and also undermine the dollar as a global reserve currency (very teenage girlish of them); Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina want more power; China wants to be left alone to pursue their gradual path towards world domination; Australia, oddly, also wants to help China pursue their gradual path towards world domination; and India wants to look pretty and gloat. Everyone else pretty much just wants more money.)

Innovation Centers

Again via The Urbanophile, here's a graphic of rates of innovation in cities around the world:



The y-axis measures "momentum: average growth of US patents in cluster, 1997-2006." Say the authors:

Innovation clusters around the world can be classified based on their growth and diversity dynamics: 'hot springs' are small, fast-growing hubs on track to become world players; 'dynamic oceans' consist of large and vibrant ecosystems with continuous creation and destruction of new businesses; 'silent lakes' are older, slower-growing hubs with a narrow range of large established companies; 'shrinking pools' have been unable, so far, to expand beyond their start-up core and so find themselves slowly migrating down the value chain.

The concept here is interesting enough, though I'm not sure what the point of going to all the trouble of presenting this much data is if you're not going to label most of it. There are a bunch of cities that are classified as shrinking pools? Well, bully. Now which ones are they? The graphic doesn't say. Anyways, you can read the article at What Matters for details on their methodology.

The Housing Bubble, Mapped

From USA Today (via The Urbanophile.):

Two maps, one from 2000 and the other from 2007, show the share of Americans taking on huge new debt to buy a home increasing dramatically across the country. By 2007, the national average was 9% of all borrowers, a rate higher even than at the peak of the U.S. housing boom in 2006.

I think we all have a pretty good sense by now that the housing market went through a bit of a maniacal phase in the recent past. But it's interesting to note that the distribution of mania was far from geographically uniform: it was a phenomenon of the West more than the East (including the interior West to a greater extent than I'd realized); of Minneapolis more than Chicago, and Chicago more than the rest of the Midwest; of Boston and DC more than Philadelphia. And Texas appears to be entirely blameless in the whole fiasco.

And here's a similar map for England:



It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison, as this map shows housing prices rather than mortgage rates, but it seems that the bubble in England was much more geographically uniform.

Income and the 2008 US Election

Andrew Gelman takes a look at the 2008 election results in terms of class. You wouldn't know this if you followed the mainstream media depiction of politics as an essentially cultural battle rather than an economic one, but it turns out that people mostly vote their economic interest:







If you are rich, you probably voted Republican. If you are poor, you probably voted Democrat. Fancy that! Gelman notes, in response to a commenter: "Regarding Robert's comment that 'the map based on rich Americans only corresponds so closely to the image of the US presented by pundits TV talking heads': Exactly. That's a key point of Red State, Blue State."

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do is Gelman's book, in which he argues what these maps bear out: that people who don't have a lot of money favor the party that tends to offer more support for people who don't have a lot of money, and that people who have a lot of money favor the party that tends to offer more support for people who have a lot of money. Go figure. So why does the media seem to portray politics as a battle between church-going gun-owning social conservatives and secular gay-marrying liberals? Well, another thesis of Gelman's book is that, to the extent there is a culture war that manifests itself in the voting booth, it's a phenomenon of the upper classes: people who have the luxury of voting on cultural issues will do so; others will vote for their economic interests, all else being equal. But of course most media pundits are wealthy - they are just the sorts of people who have the luxury of voting on cultural issues. No wonder they tend to ignore the significance of class in voting behavior.

Unemployment in the US

The New York Times is out with a couple of maps today depicting the state of the labor market in the US. (Hint: it's not great!) This one shows unemployment rates in every county.



They also show the change in unemployment from a year ago:



There are some other maps there as well which allow you to see that the two main areas that have been hit the hardest are those where the economy is dominated by manufacturing (in the midwest and the southeast) and those where the housing bubble reached oscenely bloated proportions (the east and west coasts). The Great Plains region and West Virginia have actually done pretty well so far; surprising, since these areas weren't exactly booming before the recession. But maybe that's the point: people were already trying to leave these areas, so it's not as if there was a housing bubble to pop in like Minot, North Dakota. And in those areas the labor market has been adjusting for decades - since the Dust Bowl, maybe - to a certain lack of economic dynamism, and the excess workers had long since already left.

Who's Buying What?

That's the question that Good Magazine asks. Their answer is this map graphic.



It measures 20 countries that seem to have been chosen more or less arbitrarily by per capita expenditure in 5 categories: clothing, household goods, alcohol and tobacco, recreation, and electronics.

It's unclear why these particular countries were chosen - maybe they just had the best data? Who knows. At any rate, Scandinavia is way overrepresented, as are the Anglophone countries. Africa - not for the first time in history - gets the short end of the stick.

The biggest consumers in each category are:
Clothing - Norway
Household Goods - Norway
Alcohol and Tobacco - Norway
Recreation - Norway
Electronics - Norway

A clean sweep! And the least consumptive, so to say?
Clothing - India
Household Goods - Pakistan
Alcohol and Tobacco - India
Recreation - Pakistan ($1!)
Electronics - Pakistan

A clean sweep for South Asia, at any rate. Though this seems like the sort of competition where you wouldn't want to come in either first or last.

The graphic also indicates the top item of these five categories in every surveyed country. In all ten industrialized countries, it's recreation. Of the ten developing countries, clothing is the top item in 7, household goods in 2, and alcohol and tobacco in 1. (Go, Brazil! At least one nation has its priorities in order.)

Place of the Week: Nauru

The possibly misguided continuation of the Place of the Week series takes us this time to an erstwhile paradise in the South Pacific: the Micronesian microstate of Nauru.



Status: Independent Republic
Area: 21 sq. km.
Population: 13,770
Unemployment rate: 90%
Rank, in GDP, among the world's nations in the early 1980s: 2
Rank today, according to the CIA World Factbook: 141

The tragic story of the island nation of Nauru begins in the digestive tracts of countless generations of sea birds. Those were the production facilities of what would become one of the world's most valuable commodities: bird shit. Or at least, it would become very valuable after being deposited in copious quantities over millions of years and reacting with the uplifted coral that formed the structure of the island to become phosphate, from whence comes phospohorus, which has many industrial and agricultural uses, including as a key component of fertilizer.

Turns out that the combination of Nauru's geology and its ecology allowed the island's phosphate deposits to become some of the largest and highest-quality deposits in the world. Mining began in the early 20th Century, when Nauru was a colony of Germany. The island would go through periods as a possession of Australia, Japan, and the UN before becoming the world's smallest independent nation in 1968 - and all the while, the mining continued.

It was an absolute bonanza. The small population of the island gained enormous wealth from its phosphate exports. By the early 1980s, the country had the second-highest per capita income in the world, after the United Arab Emirates. And, like the UAE today, the country was not ashamed to spend the wealth it derived from its natural resources. People chartered planes to go on international shopping trips around the Pacific Rim. The country imported fancy sports cars, even though the entire nation can be circumnavigated by bicycle in an hour and a half and the highest speed limit on the island is 25 mph. The nouveau riche Nauruans were living the good life and profiting from a natural bounty that seemed to be a limitless gift from God.

Unfortunately, the island's good fortune did not extend to its investments of that wealth, to the extent that investments were even made:

"We just didn't know how to handle it all," a barefoot islander told me as he played his guitar beneath a tree.

"Hardly anyone thought of investing the money. Dollar notes were even used as toilet paper," his friend told me. "It's true," he insisted seeing my look of disbelief. "It was like every day was party day."

The world's most dubious investors - from the nefarious to the clueless - saw in Nauru a likely target for their financial schemes. One advisor to the Republic of Nauru convinced the government to invest in Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, a West End production that would go down as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of the London stage. The country also made various real estate investments around the world that would be gradually vaporized by corruption and mismanagement. And when the nation finally took a break from its decades-long party to look around itself, it made a discovery: the phosphate - the source of all the good times - was nearly gone, and so was the money.


The country has tried other means to keep its financially foundering fortunes afloat. It went the route of other island nations by trying to make it as a tax haven and money laundering center, though pressure from the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering quickly scotched that plan. And in 2001, a Norwegian boat carrying a cargo of human refugees, including some from Afghanistan, was diverted from Australia to Nauru; in exchange for keeping the refugees in a detention center on the island, Australia threw Nauru a lifeline of financial aid. Australia decided to close the facility in 2008, and its unclear how the island will deal with the consequent shock to its now refugee detention-based economy.

Meanwhile, mining has left the once pristine nation comprehensively denuded. A thin limn of foliage clings to the edge of the island, but almost the entire interior - 90% of the island - has been rendered a wasteland. The country, having squan- dered its resources and its wealth, is now left without even a healthy natural environment from which to rebuild.

Nauru's tale is the story of a population whistling past the graveyard as it gradually depletes the finite resource on which its economy and its society depends, preferring to live extravagantly without considering what might happen when that resource inevitably disappears.

Feel free to draw your own lessons.

UPDATE: NPR's This American Life had a really good episode a little while back about Nauru. Here's the link.

Gas Prices in the US

Gas Buddy has an interactive map of gasoline prices for every county in the 48 most important states in the US.



You can also zoom in to see even more fine-grain data, like this. Handy! You can know just what neighborhood, and even what specific gas station in town to go to to get the cheapest gas. At the broader scale, you can clearly see the effect state-level policies have on the price of gas - something that not a few New York drivers who live close to the New Jersey state line are keenly aware of. As usual, the West Coast leads the way on priciness, thanks mostly to higher taxes in those states (though those of you in Europe will chortle at $2.20/gallon being considered "pricey" - it generally costs several times as much in England, for instance).

And, while prices are barely half of what they were last summer, before the global economy (and therefore global demand) did it's coyote-over-the-cliff impersonation, they're starting to creep up again. Weirdly, though, this is despite the fact that oil prices continue to fall. What gives? This, evidently:

The benchmark for crude oil prices is West Texas Intermediate, drilled exactly where you would imagine. That's the price, set at the New York Mercantile Exchange, that you see quoted on business channels and in the morning paper.

Right now, in an unusual market trend, West Texas crude is selling for much less than inferior grades of crude from other places around the world. A severe economic downturn has left U.S. storage facilities brimming with it, sending prices for the premium crude to five-year lows.

But it is the overseas crude that goes into most of the gas made in the United States. So prices at the pump will probably keep going up no matter what happens to the benchmark price of crude oil.

Even oil drilled in North Dakota and Canada is going for about $10 more per barrel than the stuff from Texas, which accounts for the higher prices in the northern Great Plains.

Of course, the prices paid at the pump are only the direct costs of gasoline. There are also the indirect costs of a massive military apparatus which is necessary to maintain access to oil supplies in the middle east; the cost to human development of oil-funded rights-suppressing governments from Africa to Asia; and the long-term and incalculable costs of the global warming processes that are being furthered every time we fill up our tanks. Those costs don't mount on a spinny little dial right before our eyes, so we tend not to count them, of course. But they are very real, and growing with every passing year.

Having said that, gas in the US is still extraordinarily cheap. Consider:



Refined gasoline costs less than bottled water. (UPDATE: see comments for a different take on this point) Prices have a lot of room to grow. And with a commodity as inherently valuable as oil, the chances are near to certain that, in the long run, they will.

A Phantasmagoria of Economic Data

This title exaggerates. I just wanted to be the first person in the history of the English language to write that phrase. Still, the dismal scientists who put together this interactive web tool from the OECD have found a way to present an awful lot of information about the economies of OECD nations. Here's an image from their map of Europe:



It's mostly interesting in that you can compare intranational regions internationally, if you see what I'm saying. Like, in the image above, you can compare per capita GDP in Bretagne not just to GDP in other regions of France, but to Yorkshire, Calabria, and Istanbul as well. Its graphics for Europe are especially interesting, since there's such a broad range of development among European nations - broader than you might think - and also the sub-national territories are mostly small, so the data is pretty fine-grained. You can also roll over all those various regions, bundeslander, and voivodeships to get a raft of demographic and economic data, and you can do so for the other OECD regions as well: Canada/US/Mexico, Japan/S. Korea, and Australia/New Zealand. Also: scatter plots - and that's all I'm going to say about that.

The OECD, in case you were wondering, is a group of 30 nations that are characterizzed by a high level of economic and human development, and a general commitment to democratic principles. If you were wondering further how it is that countries like Mexico and Turkey finagled their way into the group while Argentina, Chile and Brazil were left out - well, I'm sorry. I can't help you. I can't explain it. But I can report that, according to Wikipedia, in 2007 "the OECD Ministerial Council decided to open accession discussions with Chile, Estonia, Israel, the Russian Federation and Slovenia." One or two of those countries strike me as having less than a hearty commitment to democratic principles, but what do I know.

The Geography of Economic Tumult

The Atlantic has put up a series of interactive maps that let you track the relative economic power and influence of US cities over time.



The maps accompany an article by urbanist and pop sociologist Richard Florida. He makes a bunch of interesting predictions about the effects the economic meltdown will have on the geography of the United States. He thinks, for instance, that New York is positioned to come out okay - better than a lot of places, at least - thanks to its economic and cultural diversity. (Despite being the epicenter of the financial collapse, only 8% of New York's jobs are in finance; compare that to 18% in Des Moines, Iowa.) Indeed, he writes:

While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth. These typically less affluent places are likely to become less wealthy still in the coming years, and will continue to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis behind them.

The Rust Belt - the cities built on manufacturing in the 19th and 20th centuries, from Buffalo to St. Louis - is especialy likely to take it on the chin, and perhaps to never fully recover. More surprising is that the Sun Belt might get hit pretty hard as well. The vast arc of fast-growing states in the south and west will have some winners, like Charlotte and Austin, which have been adding jobs in the "creative class" sector. But the growth of other cities, like Las Vegas and Phoenix, has been mostly driven by construction and real estate - essentially, their growth has been based on their growth, which is not the most sustainable model in a recession.

Florida also makes prescriptions for the future, arguing that the suburban model of urban growth is past its prime and ill-suited to the developing creative economy; that homeownership should not be a goal of public policy; and that we should be cultivating growth in the burgeoning megaregions and the creative centers within them. Ultimately, he foresees this:

What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.

Sounds good to me.

Wealth II

Here's more on wealth since 1500, from Visualizing Economics:



You can pretty clearly see that the story of the global economy from like 1750 to 1950 was really all about a redistribution of wealth from India and China to Western Europe and the US. Other regions of the world just didn't change that much one way or the other.

But it's also interesting how many trends have reversed themselves since ca. 1950. The dominance of the US and Western Europe has receded somewhat. Japan has about doubled its historical share of global wealth. China and India have halted their long slides (though they still have a long way to go to recoup their historical norms).

We'll check in in another 500 years and see how things are coming along.

UPDATE: I am told that - this being The Map Scroll rather than The Chart Scroll - good form demands that this post include a map. So, here is a moderately relevant map animation showing the changing map of Europe from 1519 CE to the present.

Wealth

Global Wealth in 1500:



Global Wealth in 2002:



These are from the UK's Daily Mail. They're cartograms - and we loves the cartograms! - showing the relative wealth of nations in 1500 and in 2002; the larger the nation, the more wealth it had.

One thing I find interesting is that wealth at both times in history was tripodal. In 1500, the 3 big axes were Western Europe, India, and China; in 2002 it's the US, Western Europe, and East Asia. That might be a coincidence, or it might be the case that there's some reason that that's a more naturally stable way for wealth to tend to become distributed across the globe. Maybe the geography of the world is such that there tend to be dominant powers that exert enough power to dominate roughly 1/3 of the planet, beyond which further concentration of wealth sets off negative feedbacks, like the way growth in predator populations eventually starts to induce a negative feedback when they start eating all the prey and running out of food. But I lean toward coincidence.

Also: West Africa wasn't really doing too poorly for itself in 1500. Nigeria (or whatever turn-of-the-16th Century conglomeration of tribes and city-states and kingdoms constituted the area corresponding to modern Nigeria (you see how much I know about African history)), for instance, was about on par with the middle-range European nation-state of the time.

Plus: you might expect wealth to serve as a decent proxy for military power. But, while Mexico is clearly not the equal of Spain in 1500, the disparity is hardly so severe as to account for the fact that, just a few years later, Cortes would march into the Aztec capital with like a couple of drinking buddies and a mule and conquer the whole freakin civilization. So clearly other factors were involved. (And indeed, here are three suggestions.)

And finally: has Russia ever made good on its enormous resource potential?

Oil!

More cartograms! This one shows oil reserves - the bigger the country the more of the black goo they have underground.



And this one shows energy consumption - not just oil, but you can bet this map tracks pretty well with regular old oil consumption, too.



When it comes to oil, it's pretty obvious that it's the Saudi's world; we all just live in it. And if you throw in the other 11 members of OPEC - Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela - you're talking about an enormous proportion of the world's reserves of oil. It raises (but does not beg) the question: is energy independence - getting off our addiction to foreign (especially OPEC) oil - a reasonable goal?

I can think of two ways to answer this: first, US oil production has been declining for 35 years, and no matter what the drillbabydrillers say, no amount of extra drilling, in Alaska or thte continental shelf or anywhere else, is going to reverse that long-term trend. Meanwhile, the population of the US continues to grow, there are still hundreds of millions of cars on the roads, and oil continues to literally be the lubricant that allows the economy to run (or, at least, to do whatever it's doing these days). Of course, the dependence is every bit as great for Europe (outside the exporting nations of Norway and Russia) and the big economies of Asia. Conservation can help, marginally, but short of a drastic and long-term reorganization of the world's energy infrastructure, the status quo will remain, and the Saudis, et al. will continue to have their fist around the IV that is the economic lifeline of the world.

There's another possibility, though, if the Export Land Model is correct. The ELM (put together by geologist Jeffrey Brown and others (see The Oil Drum for more)) argues that as a country reaches peak production, the combination of rising domestic oil consumption and declining production can cause net oil exports to, essentially, fall off a cliff, and even major exporters will reach zero net exports in just a few years. So the question is, are the major exporters anywhere near peak oil production? Because if so, that export spigot may be far closer to shutting off than most people realize. And so we might be far closer to "energy independence" than it seems, in the sense that we'd no longer be using much in the way of foreign oil - though energy independence, in such a scenario, would be a far grimmer outcome than any of us would want.

Mapping Cuts in Mass Transit

Via Matt Yglesias, Transportation for America has put together an interactive map showing the cities around the country where the recession has caused cutbacks in service that aren't addressed in the stimulus bill as it's currently constituted. This is stuff that could easily be funded, would stimulate the economy right now, and would disproportionately benefit the economically hardest-hit. In short, there's no reason these things shouldn't be covered by the stimulus.

Mapping Our Oil Addiction

The Rocky Mountain Institute has produced an oil map webtool that lets you see how oil imports to the US have evolved since 1973.



You can also track the amounts spent on oil imports over time, and the dollar amounts of oil being imported from individual countries.

One thing this tool makes abundantly clear is how different the last few years' run-up in oil prices was. Prices spiked during the first and second oil crises - ca. 1973 and 1979, respectively. But in both cases, the price surge was a direct result of a decrease in supply. The last few years, however, saw prices spike higher than they'd ever been, even though supply remained roughly constant. How could this be?

Some blame speculation in the oil markets. But if this was the case, supplier countries ought to have responded to the surging prices by increasing exports - something they failed to do until prices got really astronomical last summer.

I think a more likely explanation is that the past few years have seen global demand butting up against the geological limitations on global supply. This is more commonly known as the phenomenon of peak oil. Supply limitations are the only way to countenance flat exports in the face of soaring prices.

Of course, prices collapsed last year after two things happened: OPEC finally increased production a smidge, and (more importantly) the global economy took a long walk on a short pier, causing demand to crash. So the pressure on global oil supplies has eased - for now. We'll have to see what happens when the economic picture gets rosier again. If oil prices again quickly begin to spike, we'll have a good indication that the era of peak oil has arrived.