By the way, while he was here, what we did was walk all around town. Four to five miles per day. We saw tons of stuff, but paid for very little. We also took Keith up to Cambridge, and it was nice to pull out my old student ID and get access to all sorts of places.
Maybe we'll make a longer post someday about Keith's visit. Right now, I've got chart fever.
I really like charts - a picture really is worth a thousand words. Here are two interesting ones:
This one shows how different Americans and Britons are. They tend to be far left of us on every issue. Grace and I were talking about how, the longer we live abroad, the more we realise that America is not necessarily the norm. When you grow up in a place you just assume that's the way things are everywhere. Anyway, not the case. Americans are more religious and more patriotic than is common in other developed countries, for example.
Here's another good chart.
London is the third most expensive city to live, in the world! Ay! And look, the first American city is New York, but it comes in at number 39! Whoa! (if you care why the American cities are so low, its because the dollar is so weak)
I also read a lot of economics blogs - and economists love charts. Here are some of my faves.
This is how happy people say they are, versus GDP per capita for lots of different countries. Perhaps not surprisingly, richer countries are happier countries. But there are some strange anomalies. China is richer than India, but also more miserable. And Pakistan - which is even poorer and didn't even have a very strong democracy when the survey was taken - is happier than both!
Finally, here's a good one for the current economic troubles in America.
This is the average cost of a standard home, adjusted for inflation, over the last 120 years. You might need to click on it to see it bigger. You can see prices have really shot up, and not really for any good reason. A lot people think they're going to come all the way back down to where they usually are, over the next few years. Yikes!
I should say though, this is an average for America, and things are really different in different parts of the country. In New York and California, for instance, house prices went way up, but in Iowa, probably not so much.
Anyway, I like charts.
1 comment:
With regard to that first chart about British versus American attitudes, it's interesting to notice also that in Britain the range of opinions are a lot less divergent. There is much more general agreement than in the US where opinions are spread over a much wider range. This tends to be reflected in daily life here. The parties tend to be quite similar in what they think administration and policy should be, even if they are ideologically still conflicted.
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