Investing my money
Here’s some reinforcement from [The Big Picture](http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/your-three-investing-opponents/) about why I have trouble putting money in the stock market:
Recall what Charles Ellis said when he was overseeing the $15-billion endowment fund at Yale University:
Watch a pro football game, and it’s obvious the guys on the field are far faster, stronger and more willing to bear and inflict pain than you are. Surely you would say, ‘I don’t want to play against those guys!’
Well, 90% of stock market volume is done by institutions, and half of that is done by the world’s 50 largest investment firms, deeply committed, vastly well prepared — the smartest sons of bitches in the world working their tails off all day long. You know what? I don’t want to play against those guys either.
Does it make sense to buy a house?
Here’s a great interactive graphic from Trulia.com that shows the ratio of renting to buying. The ratio is how many years of paying before you paid full price for an equivalent house. This data is comparing the median list price with that of a two bedroom apartment.
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History of Science Fiction
From [here](http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/HistoryofScienceFiction.html) is this great history of science fiction in poster form. So many fond memories: “Cities in Flight”, “The World of Null A”, “Stranger in a Strange Land”, “Dune”, …
Corporate Taxes: Maybe not so high
So you think US corporate taxes are too high? It’s holding back the economy? Here is what poor General Electric has had to pay.
What’s that right most graph? “Effective Tax Rate”: aren’t those numbers negative? What, US taxpayers paid them money? They most have declared heavy losses. What, they made billions of dollars every year for the past seven years except for 1 year!
Corporate welfare at it’s best!
Inflation
From [Calculated Risk](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2011/03/core-measures-show-increase-in.html) is this graph of inflation. You can see the slight, recent, upturn. It is important to see the context: we are still way below “normal” levels and unemployment is still way above “normal” levels.
Death’s in Guantanamo
In the Vietnam war, [144](http://www.uswardogs.org/new_page_18.htm) POWs died. According to [documents released to the ACLU](http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/22/detainee.documents/index.html) there were 190 deaths of detainees in the War on Terror (not all at Guantanamo).
… a detainee was killed by an unnamed sergeant who walked into a room
where the detainee was lying wounded “and assaulted him … then shot
him twice thus killing him,” one of the investigating documents says.
The sergeant than instructed the other soldiers present to lie about the incident.
Later, the document says an unnamed corporal then shot the deceased
detainee in the head after finding his corpse.
It’s horrific that for decades we thought of the treatment of POWs in Vietnam as the epitome of brutality but more prisoner’s died in our custody then in Vietnamese custody!
The defense department defends it as not being as bad as it sounds and that people have been convicted of murder:
The Defense Department disputes the allegations, saying it
takes detainee treatment seriously.
Wealth and Income Distribution
I keep having trouble getting my head around how wealth is distributed in America — or maybe just that I don’t seem to explain it well enough to other people. There’s an article, “[Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power](http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html)”, that looks into the details. Most of the data is only up to 2007 but the suggestion is that things have gotten worse since the recession:
So far there are only tentative projections … there has been an “astounding” 36.1% drop in the wealth (marketable assets) of the median household since the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. By contrast, the wealth of the top 1% of households dropped by far less: just 11.1%. So as of April 2010, it looks like the wealth distribution is even more unequal than it was in 2007.
The following shows how wealth is distributed but it’s a little misleading if you don’t read the labels. The “pie” is all wealth but each slice represents a different percentage of households. For example, the big slice represents 1% of households (about 1.1 million) and all the other slices represent about 109 million households.
Another way of looking at similar data is this chart that summarizes a survey asking people how they think wealth is distributed and also how they think the ideal should be shaped. The top most bar represents how wealth is actually distributed. Note that the bottom 40% of households don’t even show up in the top most bar:
In case you are thinking this is normal, the article includes this information over time and things are only getting worse.
Who can live here?
Here is similar data to to the [Interactive Census Data](http://peteware.com/2010/12/interactive-census-data/) but with a little more Manhattan orientation. The [interactive chart](http://envisioningdevelopment.net/map) let’s you look at different neighborhoods and shows the income distribution. You can also see how many people can afford to live there assuming they can pay 30% of their income for rent.
