A statistic worth pondering

According to November 26 issue of BloombergBusinessweek, from 1993 to 2009 U.S. universities added administrators 10 times as fast as they added tenured faculty.

Thanksgiving economics

Timothy Taylor over at his blog the Conversable Economist (see here) has a nice post on the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner and he has the graph below.  The post is worth a read.

Data on inequality in Mississippi

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (see here) has a very interesting report on "inequality" in the United States (the report contains state-by-state data).  The summary graph below is for Mississippi (listed by CBPP as one of the states with the greatest inequality).

Geography of the Popular Vote

From TPMLiveWire (see here) we have the following (preliminary results):

U.S. Trade Data

The Department of Commerce updates us on U.S. Trade (revised through September 2012):

The Fiscal Cliff

Well, there is bound to be considerable interest in the Fiscal Cliff now that the election is over.  The Wall Street Journal (see here) has a nice graphic summarizing it.

Good day for "poll quants"

Well, the election is over and there are some big winners other than the political candidates; namely, the "poll quants" as there are called.  That is, the statistically trained people who used sophisticated models to forecast the results of the election (for example, see Nate Silver's work at the blog FiveThirtyEight, Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium, and Drew Linzer at Votamatic).  That were spot on while all the political pundits were way off (to be kind).

A reminder!

Just a reminder for all those people (and there appear to be lots of you) who wonder why the U.S. economy hasn't been "fixed" yet (as if we were repairing a washing machine).  The graph below uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is posted by Catherine Rampell (see here).

She also has the following graph in her November 2 article in the New York Times (see here).