Brendan Barry – Page 67

Tariffs and Trade with China

Following up on yesterday’s post about the facts on tariffs, today we look at an article from Politico that polled voters on their feelings about trade and trade policy. Now the poll dates from the beginning of June and unfortunately a lot of things have changed since then. But, the data overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that voters, at that time at least, do not support placing tariffs on goods coming into the US.

Let’s take a look at another component of the article, however, a chart exploring the infamous trade deficit. First of all, trade deficits do not work like how the president says they do—but we will come back to that in another post. In short, trade deficits are neither good nor bad. They are just one way of describing one facet of a trade relationship between two countries.

This piece looks at the trade balance between the United States and China.

We will get into why this isn't all bad in another post — We will get into why this isn’t all bad in another post

Now, from the topical standpoint, it does a really nice job of showcasing how our imports have surged above our experts. From a topical standpoint, however, we do not know if this is a total trade deficit or just in goods, like the president prefers to talk about, or in goods and services, the latter of which accounts for way more than half of the US economy.

From a design perspective, I have a few thoughts and the first is labelling. The chart does label the endpoints of the data set, 1985 and 2017. But aside from a grey bar representing the Financial Crisis, there are few other markers to indicate the year. In smaller charts, I often do this myself, because space. But here there is enough space for at least a few intervening years to be labelled.

Secondly, the white outline of the red line. I have talked before of a trend to showcase a line over other lines with that thin stroke. But this is the first time I can recall the effect being used over an area filled with colour. Is it necessary? Because the area is light and the line dark and bright, probably not.

Then the outline appears on the text in the graphic, in particular the labels of imports, exports, and the trade deficit label. The labels for the imports and exports likely are necessary because of that light grey used for the text. But, as with the line for the trade deficit, its label likely provides sufficient contrast the thin white outline isn’t necessary.

Credit for the piece goes to Jeremy C.F. Lin.

The Facts on Tariffs

Unless you avoid the news, we all heard a lot about tariffs this weekend. So this morning, instead of going with some other things I found, I decided I wanted to look and see just what the data is on tariffs. Turns out Trump is wrong on the data about tariffs. In short, in 2016 the US had a slightly higher average tariff for all products at 1.61%. The EU was at 1.6%. And the Canadians? They charged an outrageous 0.8%.

The data comes from the World Bank.

And over breakfast, I did not really have the time to clean this graphic up, so it shows the whole world. Though it goes to show you, the western countries against which Trump raged this weekend generally have low tariffs, some lower than what the US.

Credit for this one is mine.

Philly Rules

Yo. C’mon, bro. This jawn is getting tired. Just stop already.

If you did not catch it this week, the most important news was Donald Trump disinviting the Super Bowl champions Eagles to the White House to celebrate their victory over the Patriots. He then lied about Eagles players kneeling during the US anthem—no player did during the 2017 season. He then claimed that the Eagles abandoned their fans. Yeah, good luck convincing the city of that.

So naturally we have a Friday graphic for youse.

Full disclosure: I root for the Patriots. But I mean, seriously, can’t youse guys do the math?

English Pride

Or the lack thereof.

Today’s post references a short article from the BBC about some YouGov survey results that examine English respondents’ pride in being English.

The post uses numerous bar charts to examine the demographic and political splits of the results as well as to try and come to a sense of what defines “English”. But the thing that struck me the most? A map of the results.

London is the least county-like in the UK

The most obvious result is in the title: Londoners identify the least as being part of an English county. That sort of regional association firms up the further one travels from London. The exceptions, however, are still urban areas. There are pockets of that light yellow-ish colour to be found also in the areas of Birmingham, the UK’s second-largest city, and, to a lesser extent, Manchester. Then there are other areas around the bigger universities like Cambridge and Oxford.

It makes me wonder how a similar question would play out across the United States. How much to do you identify with being a Pennsylvanian, or an Illinoisan? A New Yorker? And then I would probably take it a step further as well as a step backward in this political climate. How much does one identify with their local community or city? Are you a Philadelphian? A Chicagoan? A New Yorker? And then do you identify more with a city/community or a state more than you do as an American? How much is today’s divisiveness stoking regionalism or tribalism?

Alas, I am not a surveyor nor do I own a company that does surveys. So these sorts of questions are likely to remain curiosities for me.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Primarily California

Today is primary day and everyone will be looking to the California results. Although probably not quite me, because Eastern vs. Pacific time means even I will likely be asleep tonight. But before we get to tonight, we have a nice primer from last Friday’s New York Times. It examines the California House of Representatives races that we should be following.

53 districts are a lot to follow in one night…

Like most election-related pieces, it starts with a map. But it uses some scrolling and progressive data disclosure. The map above, after a bit of scrolling, finally reveals the districts worth following and their 2016 vote margins.

Out of all 53, these are the districts the Times says to watch

From there the article moves onto a bit of an exploration of those few districts. You should read the full article—it’s a short read—for the full context on the California votes today. But it does make some nice of bar and line charts to plot the differences in presidential race vs. congressional race margins and the slow Democratic shift.

Credit for the piece goes to Jasmine C. Lee and Karen Yourish.

Mapping Disasters

Last weekend I enjoyed several days off for Memorial Day. But that Sunday I enjoyed a nice, full-spread graphic in the New York Times. The clue that I was in for a treat was on the front page, beneath the fold, with a small map with some green, magenta, and orange.

The map was definitely buried towards the bottom of the page, but it caught my attention.

When I looked more closely I could see that the piece was about the location of disasters. But the actual graphic itself served more as an advertisement than informative graphic. The closeup here shows only that there is a lot of green in the American southeast. But nowhere do we get a sense of what it means other than probably some bad disasters.

I mean I kind of figured that green was hurricanes from this.

But that is the point of an advertisement—to get you to turn to the page, click on the banner, fork over your e-mail address. To be fair, I did not jump straight to the spread as I was going to read the entire section. But when I did finally get there, I got map overload.

The piece uses small multiples across the top. One for each of the last 16 years. Clearly we get the legend explaining what each circle means. But we also have the added context of storm tracks for the tropical systems. And with those in particular, it is fascinating to see how unpredictable tropical systems can be in terms of their impact on America’s coastal regions.

Along with the text of the article, we also get a bar chart exploring the actual dollar value of the largest disasters, major disasters being defined as those over $1 billion in damages. I was a bit surprised to see that Harvey lower than Katrina, as I heard a lot about Harvey surpassing Katrina, but maybe the full data is not in yet? Or maybe it needs to account for the changing value of the dollar?

Regardless, the big thing is the map, as in the big map. Conceptually we get nothing terribly complex, just a choropleth for US postal codes. But keep in mind that more often than not, we want simpler forms because they work the best at showing clearly and concisely what the data is trying to tell us.

The only thing I could not figure out is why some cities were labelled and not others. After all, the map did stretch across 2/3 of the spread. There was clearly enough room to label Philadelphia. Maybe it is just because there looks to be comparatively few losses reported in its postal codes.

But lastly, I absolutely loved the inclusion of Puerto Rico here. No, it is not technically a US state. But it would be the 30th largest if it were. And given that at least 1,000 people died from Hurricane Maria, it is one of the deadliest hurricanes to have hit the United States. And the more attention that gets, the more likely it is Puerto Rico will get the federal assistance it needs.

Overall, this was just a great piece to sit and absorb over a cup of tea on a Sunday morning.

Credit for the piece goes to Sahil Chinoy.

Business Card Typography

I mean it was a short week, at least for my American audience, but we still made it to Friday. So let’s look at business card typography courtesy of Jessica Hagy and Indexed. I mean, this is not quite me and my card, but I still love it.

Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

Spanish Silver

A few weeks back now the Economist posted a graphic about the link between lead, silver, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. But not in the way you probably think. Instead, they graph the appearance of lead deposits in the glaciers of Greenland.

I believe that final Iberian power is meant to be the Moops.

For the full explanation you should read the short article. But this piece was right up my alley. We have ancient history, economics, science, and a timeline. And all in one neat little chart.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist’s Data Team.

Forecasting the American Midterm Elections

We are inching ever closer to the US midterm elections in November. In less than a week the largest state, California, will go to the polls to elect their candidates for their districts. So late last week whilst your author was on holiday, the Economist released its forecast model for the results. They will update it everyday so who knows what wild swings we might see between now and the election.

I will strike out against the common knowledge that this is a wave election year and Democrats will sweep swaths through Republican districts in an enormous electoral victory. Because while Democrats will likely win more overall votes across the country, the country’s congressional districts are structurally designed to favour Republicans as a result of gerrymandering after the 2010 Census redistricting. The Economist’s modelling handles this fairly well, I think, as it prescribes only a modest majority and gives that likelihood as only at 2-in-3. (This is as of 30 May.)

But how is it designed?

The big splashy piece is an interactive map of districts.

The overall state of the US in the 30 May run of the model

It does a good job of connecting individual districts to the dots below the map showing the distribution of said seats into safe, solid, likely, leaning, and tossup states. However, the interactivity is limited in an odd way. The dropdown in the upper-right allows the user to select any district they want and then the district is highlighted on the map as well as the distribution plot below. Similarly, the user can select one of the dots below the map to isolate a particular district and it will display upon the map. But the map itself does not function as a navigation element.

Selecting the newly drawn Pennsylvania 6th

I am unsure why that selection function does not extend to the map because clearly the dropdown and the distribution plot are both affecting the objects on the map. Redeeming the map, however, are the district lines. Instead of simply plopping dots onto a US state-level map, the states are instead subdivided into their respective congressional districts.

But if we are going so far as to display individual districts, I wonder if a cartogram would have been a better fit. Of course it is perfectly plausible that one was indeed tried, but it did not work. The cartogram would also have the disadvantage of, in this case, not exhibiting geographically fidelity and thus being unrecognisable and therefore being unhelpful to users.

Now the piece also makes good use of factettes and right-left divisions of information panels to show the quick hit numbers, i.e. how many seats each party is forecast to win in total. But the map, for our purposes, is the big centrepiece.

Overall, this is solid and you better bet that I will be referencing it again and again as we move closer to the midterms.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Irish Abortion Referendum

On Saturday Ireland announced the results of a referendum on changing its constitution to remove Article 8, which had made abortion illegal except in the case of risk of death to the mother. And that was it, none of the usual rape or incest clauses. I want to look at a little coverage of the results and we will start with the Irish Times.

I might have toned down the red a wee bit, though

Their presentation is straightforward, a parliamentary-like slider and a small choropleth. All the colours link to each other and you will note that at first glance there is no variation in the colours on the map. Instead they present the binary choice, yes or no. To get the details of the vote, the user needs to select the Yes% or No%. From those we see not a lot of variation—probably not unsurprising given the overwhelmingness of the vote—as the Dublin area had the most yes, the rest of Ireland fairly solidly yes, and only Donegal in the northwest voting no, and even then, barely so.

I'm not quite loving these colours at all… — I’m not quite loving these colours at all…

But then we have the Guardian’s results map. And I am a wee bit lost. The bin definitions offer a bit more granular detail and so the sweeping results from the Irish Times results can here be seen as a bit more simplified. I probably would have shifted the colours and kept the yes on one side of the spectrum and not mixed the yellows and oranges into the positive, or yes, side. The stunning part of the result was, after all, that only Donegal voted no. So I would expect the colour of the choropleth to reflect that sharp break and less the gradation seen here. It’s a curious choice.

But more importantly, I am left wondering about the data, the titles, or the descriptions—I cannot be sure. The key bit is the callout of Roscommon-Galway. The text says the constituency voted 57.2% yes. But the colour would seem to indicate that it voted 65–69% no. A simple mistake? Perhaps. But then I look at the wording of the legend and maybe not. Could percentage of yes vote mean something more like the expected total or the percentage of registered voters? Probably not, but I cannot quite figure out what is going on in Roscommon-Galway. And if it is a data error, it is only made more noticeable because they point out that is one of only two constituencies described in the text.

Post script: After writing this and doing some more investigation over the long holiday weekend, I found a different map that appears to be more in sync with the results. The above was probably a mistake that just didn’t get pulled down and replaced. Below is the correct one. But it goes to show you how an incorrect graphic can cause confusion.

Credit for the Irish Times piece goes to the Irish Times graphics department.

Credit for the Guardian piece goes to the Guardian graphics department.