

How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts - jsvine
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/06/05/upshot/how-the-recession-reshaped-the-economy-in-255-charts.html

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jashkenas
I'm one of the editors on this — and would be happy to answer any questions...

To address the obvious: It's _a lot of data_. A pixel (roughly) for each of
the 255 industries we chose to cover the private sector, for each month, for
each of the past ten years. Sadly, it may bring your browser to its knees.
I've tried some tricks to try and keep things moving along smoothly, but if
anyone has any brilliant perf. ideas that aren't already incorporated, I'm all
ears.

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jacobolus
Not a performance suggestion, but..

For the first few minutes, I found these charts confusing, because the
horizontal axis is labeled “<\- Lower Wages Industries Higher Wages ->”, but
within each chart, it represents time.

I’d recommend adding some kind of explanation/legend for this.

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jashkenas
You're quite right that we're double-coding along the X-axis (and the Y-axis
as well to a lesser extent). The introduction and the "How to read this chart"
tooltip should help explain that, as should the year legend within each mini-
chart ... but if you have a concrete idea about where we could place
additional explanation to make it clearer, let me know.

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oscilloscope
The scroll effects at the top of the page make my browser weep. I keep getting
stuck in weird half-states with the charts moving in and out of the intro
text. The hovers are quite laggy. This is Chrome on a Macbook Pro.

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sirtel
Chrome + Windows 7 is fine.

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devbug
Interestingly the average salary for "computer systems design and programming"
has gone down whilst the number of jobs have gone up.

Says a lot about the motives of the "altruistic" individuals who permeate the
myth that "everyone can code."

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Eliezer
Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I would like to respond to whatever it
is you're thinking, but I honestly don't know what exactly you're thinking!
Increasing the supply of something almost always makes the price go down
relative to what it would be otherwise! But then more trades take place too,
so more gains from trade are generated, which is wonderful! More people
getting paid high programmer salaries can increase the average per-person
salary across the whole economy, even if it means the price per programmer
goes down! So it's totally consistent for an altruist who wants more people to
be paid more to try to introduce more people to programming jobs! The same
with decreasing unemployment across the whole economy and increasing
unemployment among programmers! But I don't know if that's the part you were
confused about! Sincerely, the Market Economics Fairy!

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eli_gottlieb
Uuuhhh, correct me if I'm wrong, but if the number of actual _jobs_ are going
up (rather than job _openings_ ), it means demand and supply rose roughly in
tandem.

On the other hand, there's simultaneously a lack of wage rises in _most_ of
the technology industry combined with extreme worker shortages in _some parts_
of the industry, so it makes me think there's some vast inefficiency lurking
somewhere keeping trades from clearing. My personal theory is: it's the Bay
Area real estate markets. If we had a housing crunch in the place where
companies want to hire workers that was observed to eat up most (though not
all) available salary increases as increased rents, thus causing it to be
uneconomical for employed experts in other areas to open their jobs by leaving
for higher salaries in the industry's major center, leaving companies in the
center locked in a zero-sum struggle to hire a shrinking pool of rich workers
while increasing portions of the industry's labor force _outside_ that one
geographic area sit underutilized... it would look a lot like reality.

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clarkmoody
At the very end:

 _The graph at the top of this page includes line charts for each industry,
shaped by their change in employment over the last decade. The individual
lines are placed on the x axis (horizontally) based on the average wages paid
in that industry. They are placed on the y axis (vertically) based on the
percentage change in employment since the start of the recession in December
2007._

If you scroll past the initial confusion, you get to all of the graphs plotted
separately with nice titles.

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mikecuesta
Interesting to see Nail Salons grow so much.

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dwaltrip
I really enjoyed this, and thought the data was well presented. The first few
graphs with the hundreds of lines were definitely more confusing (I didn't
parse out the lower/higher wages aspect at first pass), but the walkthrough of
all major industries with the dozens of subcategories as individual plots was
quite interesting and clear.

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luisjgomez
I like the intent of this chart, but the Y-axis is a mess. Combining percent
change from 2007 (as units for the y-axis) with roll-overs of actual numbers
that contain data pre-2007 is very unintuitive.

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davidbrent
If you can make it to the bottom, I found those simple charts, segmented by
Industry, the most interesting and easiest to digest.

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grayclhn
The individual line graphs are easy to understand; I don't get a lot out of
the color or the jobs & wages axes.

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sirtel
I think they should be a point on the graph, rather than a line, it's quite
confusing.

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georgeecollins
TMI! Can someone tell me what I should take away from this?

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AnimalMuppet
A bunch of sectors of the economy have grown since the start of the recession.
A bunch of others haven't.

Good luck finding any rhyme or reason as to why the ones that grew, grew, and
the others didn't.

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moggflunkies
Lots of great data poorly presented.

Also browser killer.

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anigbrowl
I found it immeditaly intuitive actualy. I was a bit surprised at the breakout
sections, they seemed sort of superfluous to me.

