Tag Archives: data journalism

Our World in Data 2025 Roundup

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There is so much here you could spend all of 2026 digging into the data from 2025 and not get through it. This is a pretty amazing organization! I attempted a top 10 list and only got to 7 because I lumped together some similar things.

  1. Carbon dioxide emissions in the US and other developed countries peaked around 2006 and have been falling. Meanwhile they have skyrocketed in China and India and continue to increase more or less exponentially. Per capita emissions follow similar trends. Global sales of internal combustion engine cars appear to have peaked in 2018, and are very slowly declining while sales of electric vehicles are very slowly rising. Overall, the sale of cars in general appears to have declined slightly over the past decade or so. Interesting – does this represent other forms of mobility slowly coming to the fore? The world also appears to have passed “peak air pollution” a few years ago, with the one exception being ammonia from agricultural intensification. (I am not aware of ammonia as an air pollutant being a major human health risk, other than those exposed on or near farms. It is however a critical water pollutant and the intensification bodes badly for our surface and coastal waters. There may also be a connection between ammonia and nitrous oxide as a greenhouse gas that I do not fully understand.)
  2. Two different stories show a democracy index by country for the world and GDP per capita by country for the world. The two maps look about the same. Coincidence?
  3. Does the News Reflect What we Die From? The answer is no, of course. People die from heart attacks, cancer, and strokes, while the news focuses on homicide and other violence. I understand “If it bleeds, it leads” but I have always thought if they just put the anecdotal news in the context of some running statistics, it might help people put things in context. At the same time, another story shows that death rates from heart attacks and strokes have come down dramatically over the past century or so.
  4. Men commit suicide at higher rates than women in every country studied. In the US, the ratio is about 4 to 1 (access to guns, I wonder). In South Korea, only 2 to 1 but the overall rate of suicide is one of the world’s highest. In general, women live longer than men in most countries, but the gap is shocking in Russia. The Covid-19 death rate was also shocking in Russia. Now, part of the issue is the old one where choropleth maps draw your eye to the biggest countries.
  5. Overall, the world has made striking gains in poverty reduction because rates have gone from very high to very low in East Asia and South Asia between about 1990 and 2020. (But notably, Pakistan is lumped with the Middle East rather than South Asia and I am not sure about Bangladesh.) However, the progress stalled around then and has been reversed by increasing poverty in Africa.
  6. The map of where same sex marriage is legal looks a lot like the map of democracy and per capita income. One interesting thing is that many countries recognize foreign same sex marriages even if they do not allow their own citizens to marry. Homophobic attitudes have dropped dramatically in western countries between 1984 (75% in the United States) and 2022 (28%) although they are still higher than in Europe. (The way I look at it, trans-phobia is sort of the new homophobia, now that straight-up homophobia does not represent a viable political stance. Kind of like singling out Haitian or Somali immigrants is the mutated form of racism, now that straight-up anti-black racism is mostly out of style. So ugly as these things are, you could see them as indicators of progress.)
  7. Renewable electricity generation is growing exponentially, led by solar energy.

immigration by the numbers

This post on a blog called Demography Unplugged is a nice piece of data journalism. I have been trying to figure out if there is really a “border crisis”, or if challenges that are typical at the border are being exaggerated and cherry picked in an election year.

Measuring immigration is tricky, and this article explains how people try to do it. Basically, you want to know net migration, which is determined both by people coming in and people leaving, which both happen constantly. The Census Bureau surveys the foreign born population periodically and changes in this number are one way to do it.

Immigration really is up significantly over the past year or so. This is partly post-pandemic recovery, but it is also up significantly compared to what it has been historically even in comparably good economic times. They are coming to work. They are not coming disproportionately to commit crimes, although take a large enough group of people and there are going to be some crimes that can be cherry picked and publicized by disingenuous media outlets and political campaigns. There is no evidence I am aware of that terrorists are trying to sneak across the southern border, although of course we need to be alert for this at all ports of entry.

Some are sneaking in, but many are legally applying for asylum, after which most are allowed to enter the country while they wait for a decision on their case. This can take years, and even after a decision is made, there typically are not aggressive efforts made to find and deport them.

They are probably not taking a lot of American jobs that Americans would actually want. They are taking low wage jobs, paying taxes, and not receiving government benefits in return. Unemployment is low. Remember the labor shortage during and after the pandemic, when immigration was mostly shut off. And remember how prices shot up at least partly as a result of that labor shortage? I suspect the uptick in immigration is one factor holding wages and prices down now. The business community loves low wages, which presents somewhat of a dilemma because they also hate taxes, and the same party that advocates for low taxes also advocates for low immigration. This party generally is fine with having a dysfunctional immigration system as long as they can pin the blame on the other party.

So if you want to decrease immigration, you can let people apply for asylum at the border but not let them in until/unless their cases are decided in their favor. That exports the problem to Mexico and creates a humanitarian dilemma, which is what Trump chose to do and will do again if he gets the chance. Eventually word would get out and people would stop coming in such large numbers, but people would (and were) hurt in the meantime. You could drastically scale up whatever processes allow people to apply at U.S. embassies in their home countries. And finally, you could just try to help those countries solve some of their issues that make people want to leave, which would also be solving some of your own issues at home.

Also remember, these are relatively good economic times, and the climate change shit has not really hit the migration fan yet.

Philadelphia census

The Inquirer has a decent analysis of U.S. census results for Philly. You have to subscribe the Inquirer to read it (which I have done maybe because I was shamed by one of those articles about the decline of local news? also since I don’t really watch TV I am aware of almost no local news unless I pay for it). Anyway, a couple highlights although the graphics are worth a look:

  • They provide the Gini index and change in the Gini index over the last 5 years or so. Income inequality has gotten worse, and Philadelphia proper is the worst in the Philadelphia metro area. They point out that this could be because the rich have gotten richer or the poor have gotten poorer, or both, but then they don’t dig into that any further.
  • The depressing statistic remains that Philadelphia is the poorest major city in the United States at over 20% of residents living in poverty. This is pathetic. They picked 10 “major cities” (not clear if these are counties or metro areas) – Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio are the next poorest after Philly (go Texas!) and Chicago, New York and Los Angeles are 5-7 respectively, with San Diego and San Jose bringing up the rear (i.e., the best of the worst? or the best of the worst of the biggest?). So whatever the impression we might get in the media, the economy in California seems to be doing a bit better than Texas if poverty is the metric. The article points out that social benefits like food stamps are not considered (but maybe tax benefits like the earned income tax credit would be?) but doesn’t dig into it further.
  • About 2 of 3 Philadelphia residents were born in Pennsylvania, indicating people are not that mobile and we are not attracting new residents from elsewhere the way the sun belt cities generally area. They did not do this analysis by metro area, so including people from the New Jersey and Delaware might push this number even higher (and excluding people from, say, the northwestern tip of the state which is a 7 hour drive from here probably would not push it that much lower.)
  • Philadelphia has the second lowest percentage of foreign-born residents of the 10 cities (counties? metro areas?) studied. San Antonio had the lowest, so being near a militarized international border does not seem to correlate to attracting immigrants. Interestingly, Interestingly Philadelphia has the highest percentage of immigrants from Africa at about 11% of immigrants. Houston and Dallas are next, which again I wouldn’t have guessed. But I would keep in mind that in terms of sheer numbers, New York, LA, and Chicago may still have the most people in almost any category.
  • A majority of people over the age of 15 have never been married. This is interesting. Does this mean our city is particularly young (I don’t think so), particular groups are not getting married (I think so), or people are getting married later in life? To answer the last question, it would be interesting to know what age people tend to get married on average. I got married at 30, so if the average age were to be 25 or 30, what percent of people over that age have ever been married? What percent of people who are not married now will eventually get married? That would be an interesting number. 18% of all people over 15 are separated, divorced, or widowed (but if you want to know what % of people who get married eventually get divorced or separated, you would want to separate out the people who are widowed.) 50% of people who get married and don’t get divorced are going to get widowed – there’s a depressing thought. Or I guess it would be slightly less than 50% – I suppose a few couples go down together in car or plane crashes, sinking boats, fires/floods/building collapses, or the very occasional suicide pact. That’s sweet, now I feel better.