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Late Night Wonk: Nifty Graphs and such (plus some “new” street photography!)

Posted: January 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Economy, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , |41 Comments

Original photography by Vivian Maier. Click on thumbnail to go to vivianmaier.blogspot.com and see a larger view.

I’m going to start with the Vivian Maier photography link from David Dunlap at the New York Times LENS real quickly because otherwise it will probably get missed! It’s linked to up on memorandum right now, but it’s way at the bottom. Check it out! Here’s a link to more of her discovered work. I’m including a brief thumbnail to encourage you to go look. These are brilliant and thought-provoking images, largely from the fifties and sixties.

Alright, now for the meat of this post. It is a somewhat weighty post for a Saturday night, but there hasn’t been much time to discuss a variety of topics today with all the tragic and distressing news out of AZ understandably dominating the coverage–just look at that archive link to memeorandum, from what the page looked like at 11:30 PM on Sat. It is stunning and devastating all at once.

Anyhow, I doubt most people had the time to click over on the nifty graph pick from my roundup this morning. So I decided to spotlight it.

From Economix — “Comparing Recoveries: Job Changes” (emphasis in bold is mine):

The chart above shows job changes in this recession compared with recent ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. The line has risen since last year, but still has a long way to go before the job market fully recovers to its pre-recession level. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5.2 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that doesn’t even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

The unemployment rate (measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are actively looking for work) fell to 9.4 percent in December, from 9.8 percent in November. That might sound like good news — it is, after all, the lowest rate since July 2009 — but part of the reason for the drop was that so many people simply gave up looking for jobs.

Keep reading after the jump, because there’s a youtube worth watching if you haven’t seen it already.Probably late night Saturday is also not a good time to ask y’all to geek out on graphs. However, as much as I love hearing all the discussion in the comments at Sky Dancing and even the cozier discussions that go on over at my Let-them-listen rantbox, this time I just wanted to make sure everyone sees the graph more than anything else–especially dakinikat who can put it into perspective on how it fits in the larger economic picture and what it means about where we’re headed. The only thing I think when seeing this graph is… you guessed it… We are so F’d. I’m sympathetic to why economists say we’re in recovery in a technical sense though not in an actual sense, but I’m also sympathetic to Zaladonis’ insistence that it is irresponsible for economists on the left to push that narrative since we really are not in any kind of a recovery in any practical sense that people at the margins can feel yet. Looking at the data visually often hits that home.

I’ve been waiting for Latoya Egwuekwe to update her breathtakingly visceral “Geography of a Recession” series–I’ve linked to earlier versions in previous posts, because it really nails the story of “the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought” (the part in quotes is from Herbert’s latest op-ed).

Unless Egwuekwe has moved her content some place else on the net and I missed it, the latest update right now appears to still be the one from October 2010:

Updated 10.07.10 – The Decline: The Geography of a Recession by LaToya Egwuekwe (OFFICIAL)
From: latoyaegwuekwe | October 07, 2010 | 24,447 views

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 31 million people currently unemployed — that’s including those involuntarily working part time and those who want a job, but have given up on trying to find one. In the face of the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, millions of Americans are hurting. “The Decline: The Geography of a Recession,” as created by labor writer LaToya Egwuekwe, serves as a vivid representation of just how much. Watch the deteriorating transformation of the U.S. economy from January 2007 — approximately one year before the start of the recession — to the most recent unemployment data available today. Original link: http://www.latoyaegwuekwe.com/geographyofareces­sion.html. For more information, email latoya.egwuekwe@yahoo.com

It’s actually more of an animated string of maps than a graph, but it packs quite a punch, doesn’t it?

Well, insomniacs, thanks for reading if you made it down here to the bottom. Use the comments as an open thread and have a good night!

41 Comments on “Late Night Wonk: Nifty Graphs and such (plus some “new” street photography!)”

  1. dakinikat says:
    January 9, 2011 at 1:17 am

    Well, any day is a good day for a geek like me to geek out on graphs. I just hope that when we flip the switch every one that wakes up early instead of stays up late gets to enjoy this!!

  2. dakinikat says:
    January 9, 2011 at 1:23 am

    You know, I just want to add this because it feels like a feel good post!!
    I’ve just had it with Islamaphobia!

    Egypt’s Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as “human shields”

    Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

    From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

    “We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.

    Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

    “This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”

    In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

  3. Wonk the Vote says:
    January 9, 2011 at 1:24 am

    Kat, if you’re still around–do you see how the youtube goes over the margin a little into the sidebar? It’s not too much so I’m fine with it the way it is, but I can readjust the youtube size if you think it would help readers.

    • dakinikat says:
      January 9, 2011 at 1:25 am

      okay, I lost my geek status … can we do that?

      • Wonk the Vote says:
        January 9, 2011 at 1:30 am

        Yep, that’s how my youtubes are always different sizes–I’m always resizing them to make sure they don’t visually obstruct the content of the post.

      • dakinikat says:
        January 9, 2011 at 1:37 am

        Can you do that then? I’m pretty sure you’ve got every magic wand that I have.

      • Wonk the Vote says:
        January 9, 2011 at 1:43 am

        Oh def. I resize on my posts on here all the time too. Did it back at the ol’ watering hole. I’ll send you an e-mail on how soon. There’s a few other neat things you can do to customize the way you want your youtube to appear. It can be a bit tedious to insert the code and get it to coordinate with wordpress exactly the way you want things to appear, but it’s not difficult to understand the steps involved.

  4. paper doll says:
    January 9, 2011 at 1:34 am

    love the Vivian Maier photography link and the Egypt’s Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as “human shields” story…thanks

  5. dakinikat says:
    January 9, 2011 at 1:50 am

    1o minutes until I toggle the blog over. I really hope this turns out to be simple.

  6. dakinikat says:
    January 9, 2011 at 2:14 am

    The squirrels changed us over and now, I just have to correct the font …squirrelsattva

  7. Laurie says:
    January 9, 2011 at 5:42 am

    What lovely photos Wonk-thank you for posting.

    • Wonk the Vote says:
      January 9, 2011 at 6:03 am

      Glad you enjoyed them. The story behind Vivian Maier and her discovered works is so intriguing too– from Dunlap at Lens:

      What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

      From the John Maloof collection (vivianmaier.blogspot.com):

      After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very “keep your distance from me” type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.

      Some of her photos have pictures of children and often times it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituaries states that she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb, but I later found that she lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood.

      Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960’s-1970’s. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it’s very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship).

      I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to ‘Google’ her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her.

      I wanted to meet her in person well before I found her obituary but, the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn’t want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had.

  8. Wonk the Vote says:
    January 9, 2011 at 6:15 am

    I love this photo at the Jeff Goldstein et al. collection (vivianmaierphotography.com)… it’s labeled “human condition” on the jpeg file (click on image for larger view at the site):
    human-condition

  9. Laurie says:
    January 9, 2011 at 7:12 am

    I love all of her photos of couples, and also her self portraits.
    I must have spent at least an hour this morning looking at her work-a perfect way to begin a Sunday morning (btw whatever happened to State of Disbelief and her lovely Sunday women artists?)

    Anyway did you see this one (from the Flickr discussion group)?
    http://tinyurl.com/3ym8vcz

  10. Joyce L. Arnold says:
    January 9, 2011 at 8:50 am

    “I’m sympathetic to why economists say we’re in recovery in a technical sense though not in an actual sense, but I’m also sympathetic to Zaladonis‘ insistence that it is irresponsible for economists on the left to push that narrative since we really are not in any kind of a recovery in any practical sense that people at the margins can feel yet.”

    Thanks for the focus on jobs. I’m still surprised / dismayed at how easily the realities of the devastation in the lives of real people unemployment, or underemployment, are dismissed, avoided, ignored, minimized. Those realities can include loss of home, health care, vehicle, ability to purchase needed clothing and other basics; the necessity of turning to family and friends for help with those basic needs; increased health problems; loss of place and purpose, of sense and worth of self; increased strain and tension in families.

    A week or so ago I had a brief chat with lambert, at Corrente, who often focuses on “disemployment.” A part of his response: “The DISemployment talking point is very important because it implies agency — conscious policy choice. That position has the great merit of being true; which one can see at once, when one sees policies like WPA or Jobs Guarantee excluded from the discourse.”

    • Wonk the Vote says:
      January 9, 2011 at 10:39 am

      Hey Joyce, thanks for crossposting your reply on Sky Dancing. Glad to see a comment on unemployment in this thread.

      As you say: “Those realities can include loss of home, health care, vehicle, ability to purchase needed clothing and other basics; the necessity of turning to family and friends for help with those basic needs; increased health problems; loss of place and purpose, of sense and worth of self; increased strain and tension in families.”

      Another “culture of life, my derriere” moment. The current system is for ordinary people a culture of deterioration, substandard life, and loss of one’s sense of dignity. But for corporate people, the party never ends, nor do the bonuses. It’s amazing how they can continue to keep clamoring for small gov’t while milking all the corporate welfare that they can get away with.

      • Joyce L. Arnold says:
        January 9, 2011 at 10:58 am

        “Culture of deterioration” — scary, sad and accurate summary.

        It is “amazing” that the Corporate Elites “can continue to keep clamoring for small gov’t while milking all the corporate welfare that they can get away with.” I wonder about how the majority of us, the non-Elites, will respond. I’m not discounting the actions being taken, the words written, etc., but clearly our majority in numbers has yet to find a way to consistently counter the power of the Corporate / Wealthy few.

  11. Minkoff Minx says:
    January 9, 2011 at 2:02 pm

    This was an awesome post Wonk…

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