How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
To address the obvious: It's a lot of data. A pixel (roughly) for each of the 255 industries we chose to cover the private sector, for each month, for each of the past ten years. Sadly, it may bring your browser to its knees. I've tried some tricks to try and keep things moving along smoothly, but if anyone has any brilliant perf. ideas that aren't already incorporated, I'm all ears.
(I assume you've collected and cleaned up the raw data from the bfs.)
Jobs: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/03/05/state-o...
Wages: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/03/05/state-o...
(Note that you'll want to adjust those wages for inflation, and those jobs for population growth, depending on what you're doing.)
But our versions aren't really "cleaned up" in any meaningful way. The BLS already seasonally adjusts the jobs numbers for their CES series, which is super handy. Instead, go to the original source here:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv?ce
... and walk through the wizard to pick which data points you'd like to include in your query. One big tip, once you're on the results screen, is to click on "More Formatting Options", and then choose the "Multi-series table" format. That'll give you something much easier to pipe into Excel or into a database.
Enjoy!
For the first few minutes, I found these charts confusing, because the horizontal axis is labeled “<- Lower Wages Industries Higher Wages ->”, but within each chart, it represents time.
I’d recommend adding some kind of explanation/legend for this.
I bet rendering this many points would really scream if you could use WebGL (though it would definitely be understandable if that doesn't have broad enough support for NYT).
Really awesome work though... any chance you could blog about your tricks or the making of this particular article?
Says a lot about the motives of the "altruistic" individuals who permeate the myth that "everyone can code."
On the other hand, there's simultaneously a lack of wage rises in most of the technology industry combined with extreme worker shortages in some parts of the industry, so it makes me think there's some vast inefficiency lurking somewhere keeping trades from clearing. My personal theory is: it's the Bay Area real estate markets. If we had a housing crunch in the place where companies want to hire workers that was observed to eat up most (though not all) available salary increases as increased rents, thus causing it to be uneconomical for employed experts in other areas to open their jobs by leaving for higher salaries in the industry's major center, leaving companies in the center locked in a zero-sum struggle to hire a shrinking pool of rich workers while increasing portions of the industry's labor force outside that one geographic area sit underutilized... it would look a lot like reality.
In other words, these "altruistic" individuals have vastly grown the number of people who can earn a comfortable life without large negative impact on the rest.
So between these guys and yourself, who is altruistic, and who is "altruistic" with scare quotes? Who is creating greater good for more people, and who is watching out for themselves?
The graph at the top of this page includes line charts for each industry, shaped by their change in employment over the last decade. The individual lines are placed on the x axis (horizontally) based on the average wages paid in that industry. They are placed on the y axis (vertically) based on the percentage change in employment since the start of the recession in December 2007.
If you scroll past the initial confusion, you get to all of the graphs plotted separately with nice titles.
Good luck finding any rhyme or reason as to why the ones that grew, grew, and the others didn't.
Also browser killer.