People

0 to 6 or 1 to 7, Does it matter?

The Decoded/Pew Research Center article On a scale from 1 to 10, how much to the numbers really matter? by Jonathan Evans reports on their experiment using a 0 to 6 scale and 1 to 7 scale.  To carry it out, we randomly assigned respondents in France, Germany and the …

Read More »

How do we humanize data?

When comparing countries or even within countries, we can talk about GDP, Gini coefficients, poverty rates, etc., but sometimes (all the time?) it is hard to know what this really means for people. If a picture is worth a 1000 words then Dollar Street has 30,000,000 words as they “visited …

Read More »

How much money do parents spend on children?

  The graph here from the American Sociological Review paper Income inequality and Class Divides in Parental Investments by Schneider, Hastigs, and LaBriola (5/21/18) summarizes changes in spending on children by income. The past 40 years have witnessed historic increases in income inequality in the United States (Piketty and Saez …

Read More »