A great article by Elizabeth Warren (Harvard Law Professor and Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversight the banking bailouts).

She talks about the struggle of American families since the 70s. She mentions that today:

1) One in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just out of work.

2) One in nine families can't make the minimum payments in their credit cards.

3) One in eight Americans is on food stamps.

4) 120,000 families file for bankrupcy every month

Moreover:

1) In the boom of the 60's median family adjusted for inflation increased by 33%

2) In the boom of the 2000's median family income increased just by 1.6%

I truly recommend this article as an xray of the current economic situation.

Click here to read the complete article.


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Americans look for health care in Mexico

From the Daily Show funny story about some Americans moving to Mexico for health care.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
American Refugees Seek Health Care in Mexico
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Use of food stamps increase

New York Times article about the increase in the use of food stamps in the U.S. According to the article:

1) Food stamps help feed one in eight Americans and one in four children

2) About 36 million people use the food stamp cards

3) The Food Stamps program increases by 20,000 people a day


Click here to read the article and to see some interesting interactive maps.


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More on Superfreakonomics

A brutal review on the Climate Change chapter of Freakonomics from the New Yorker. The best quote is:

"All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us."

Click here to read the review.


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Overweight / obesity trends in the US over time

While in BAN we talk about various methods to show data, one way that we do not (yet probably should) cover is the use of maps. Maps that change over time can be especially insightful.

Here's one especially interesting map: link to map
(Scroll down the page to see the map.)

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Is America on decline?

Interesting article about the current situation of the U.S., click here.

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Climate Change debate heats up

The new book "Superfreakonomics"by Chicago economist Levitt and Dubner has created a lot of criticism about their chapter about global warming.

The debate seems to be that the authors of the book imply that cutting emissions of CO2 is not really the way to go. They favor a geoengineering approach where earth temperature is directly affected by humans.

You can read some of the criticisms here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The authors response to some of the criticisms will be found here.

My favorite quote in this whole debate is the following:

"...human-caused global warming is well-established science, far better established than any aspect of economics."

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