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

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. Read the rest of this entry »