The Economy
GDP vs. US States
Via Strange Maps, a chart/map showing US States renamed with the names of countries where the GDP is similar to that of those states.
{maps, GDP}
Illiteracy
A few weeks ago Victor Mair wrote a guest post on Language Log implying that China’s high rates of illiteracy could be cured by reforming the script, replacing difficult to learn characters with phonetic spelling. There is lots of good discussion of this topic on Language Hat, and there was a good post on the […]
Disenfranchised
The following quotes and chart were culled from Jason DeParle’s New York Review of Books article, “The American Prison Nightmare.” The issue has been covered here extensively. Here is a Google search of the Keywords archives for the word “prison.”
Black men in their early thirties are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites in […]
Employment Rate
Wikipedia lists some problems with the current method of calculating the unemployment rate in the US. These include the fact that 1.5% of the available working population is incarcerated, the large number of people who have dropped out of the work force, “involuntary part-time workers” who would like full-time work, etc. It is also worth […]
Health care
I haven’t been doing much John Edwards blogging since he announced his candidacy, but back in February I had bookmarked two articles about Edwards’ health care plan which I thought worth sharing.
First, Paul Krugman lauds the use of “‘Health Markets’: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf”:
Why is this such a good […]
Make-believe
Steve Benen, who is guest blogging over at Political Animal, quotes John Edwards answering a question as to whether he would give balancing the deficit high priority:
I think that, if we’re honest, you cannot it, it’s just common sense in the math, have universal health care, and invest in energy, and make a serious effort […]
Inequality Roundup
I’ve been delinquent in writing up the half a dozen stories on global inequality which I’ve been meaning to blog about, so here they all are in one go:
“the richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth.”
That’s looking at wealth, rather than income, but Michael Turton sent me […]
Big Mac
How long does the average worker have to labor before they can afford to purchase a Big Mac at McDonald’s? A recent study compiled the data for cities around the world. Here is a small sample of the results:
Tokyo - 10 minutes of work
New York - 13 min
London - 16 min
Taipei - 20 min
Kuala […]
Oversight
Charles Miller makes an important point:
As such, it still baffles me that a week later, the news is blanketed with Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq and Iraq, while the number one issue for voters has dropped out of some hole in the bottom of the news desk. To me, this says that either the Republicans are […]
Sideshow
Here is a challenge for the English language blogs here in Taiwan: Write something about economic inequality in Taiwan without getting sidetracked by the blue/green political sideshow.
What exactly does the bottom of Taiwanese society look like? According to the 2005 Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (九四年家庭收支調查報告) published in August by the Directorate General of […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
