Unemployment and recession comparisons

There's a nice pair of posts over at Time Magazine's Swampland blog, starting with this graph from Speaker Pelosi's office:
which commits the endlessly recurring error of not taking into account the change in population. I had this on my to-blog queue, but they got enough comments that their economic commentor, Justin Fox, came up with a version that uses the appropriate percentages, instead of raw numbers:

It's still ugly, but no where near as extreme as the original version was. Of course, we still don't know where that pale blue line is going...

Missing the point

CNN's got an interactive map up showing the projected job gain, by state, from Obama's economic stimulus plan. Here's a screen grab; you can roll over the actual map to see exact numbers in each state:
Which states look like they'll be helped the most? California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey -- all big states (in terms of population). Why is the plan biased towards big states? It's not. The map is colored based on the number of jobs created in state, but that's not very meaningful. Of course more jobs will be created in states with more people; coloring the states based on the new jobs per capita would be far more interesting.

Or maybe boring. Based on the data from the report, it looks like the states will see very similar job creation rates per capita. This graphs shows the number of jobs forecast to be created per thousand people, ranging from Mississippi, which will get about 11 jobs for every thousand people, to Wyoming, which is forecast to see about 15 new jobs for every 1,000 people. That's not a very large range at all.

Super Bowl Ad Prices

Super Bowl ad prices provide a lot of opportunities for interesting comparisons and conversations. The original price for a 30 second ad in Sunday's game $3 million, but according to Bloomberg news, only 12 of the 67 spots actually sold for that much, with two of the last ads to sell going for the "bargain" price of $2.4 million (20% off!). NBC had a record $206 million in ad revenue, which would actually work out to an average of over $3 million if there were, indeed, 67 spots. I'm not sure how those numbers relate to one another; the ad revenue total does not include pre- or post-game ads, but maybe it includes non-national spots or "revenue" for those spots promoting other NBC shows?

AdvertisingAge provides a table with a lot of historical context for Super Bowl ad prices from 1967 to 2007, giving the actual price, the inflation adjusted price, the average rating, and the average numbers of homes and viewers watching the Super Bowl. (There's clearly a problem with the listed actual, non-inflation-adjusted, price listed for 1983; it should almost certainly be $400,000, and not $1,400,000. The error doesn't propigate to the inflation-adjusted prices, fortunately.)


MSNBC has a graphic showing the cost and number of viewers over time:

Here's a graph that I created, based on the AdAge data, which shows the CPM, or cost per 1,000 views, in 2007 dollars:
I'd really like to compare the Super Bowl ad prices with the cost of other ads. I'd need to do some hunting to find relevant data.

Finally, and not directly about ad prices at all, the New York Times has a really cool interactive map of popular Twitter words around the country during the Super Bowl (found through Flowing Data.)