What: GDP per capita, chain linked volumes (2010) in euro
When: 2004-2020
Where: Current EU members (as of 2021)
Is the economic gap between new and old EU members closing?
Tag Archives: Dot chart
Are there any places where the climate is recently getting colder?
The question arises because we’re having Climate Change and not Global Warming.
Only 6 weather stations in the world have a statistically significant negative temperature trend since 2000.
Most of them are located around the equator, one is in Antarctica.
There are 391 weather stations that have at least 5 full years of data since 2000 and which have a significant trend (p-value is less than 5%).
In 385 of those stations, the temperature is rising.
When: 2000 January – 2020 December.
Where: Weather stations that have at least 5 full years of data during the period in question and have a significant regression coefficient (p-value < 5%).
Source: Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) temperature dataset https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcn-monthly
Is freedom consistent within a country?
I’ve found five freedom indices measuring various fields of freedom. The question is whether all those measures are consistent within countries, or do they vary a lot?
The answer is in the chart below the chart below – more often they’re consistent than not. Exceptions are in some Muslim countries which do not like moral freedom or democracy – those ratings are low, but they want high economic freedom – so this one particular rating is often high.
What: Freedom indices recalculated to fit the range from 0 to 1, where 1 means best index and 0 means the worst (in 3 out of 5 cases – it’s North Korea)
Index, When, Source:
Democracy Index, 2019, EIU
Human Freedom Index, 2017, The Human Freedom Index 2018: A Global Measurement of Personal, Civil, and Economic Freedom
Economic Freedom Index, 2020, The Heritage Foundation
Moral Freedom Index, 2020, The Foundation for the Advancement of Liberty
Press Freedom Index, 2020, Reporters Without Borders
Where: 172 countries were ranked on at least 3 of these indices.
Do we pay more for worse movies?
Maybe, but more no than yes.
We spend more and more money on movies even in times of television and the internet. So, not a big surprise, that more and more movies are being made.
Median rating of all movies in the IMDB database is declining. Is it a sign of movies getting worse? No, its a sign of more movies being made, when this art is accessible to not only exceptional talents but mediocre talents as well. Anyway, who watches 2000 movies a year? Let’s become picky.
Let’s pick the most popular 200 movies each year and calculate their median. Now there is a stable trend – median popular movie usually has a rating of just around 6.4. (Movie popularity is measured in the number of ratings on IMDB). That’s good.
Now let’s take 200 top-rated movies each year with at least 25 000 ratings. A sharp decline becomes visible! And before the 80s not many such movies existed at all. So, if you like only top-rated popular movies, you might experience deterioration in their quality. Sequels of Transformers are getting worse and worse.
However there are great lesser-known movies, especially those made in non-English speaking countries, so they get less attention and therefore fewer ratings. I’d subjectively say that a good lesser-known movie has at least 4000 ratings. If we pick 200 best such movies, we get a different view – often a median movie will have a rating higher than 7, and no permanent downward trend is present. Great!
What: Movie earnings in USD billion adjusted for inflation.
The number of movies – with more than 100, 4000 and 25 000 ratings.
IMDB movie ratings indicate the median rating calculated for every year, and a trend line fitted using a generalized additive model.
All movies – those which have at least 100 ratings
Most popular movies – 200 most rated but having at least 100 ratings (because there were times when less than 200 movies were made).
Top-rated popular movies – 200 top-rated movies from those having at least 25 000 ratings.
Top-rated movies for cinephiles – 200 top-rated movies from those having at least 4000 ratings.
If less than 40 movies left remaining after filtering – no rating calculated for that year.
When: 1968 – 2019
Where: Movie earnings represent earnings around the globe.
Source:
IMDB for ratings and number of movies
the-numbers.com for movie earnings.
WB and IMF for inflation used to adjust earnings.
Does reflective happiness correlate with positive emotions?
I have put countries into four categories:
– those which have the most positive emotions (big circle – excited)
– those which have the least positive emotions (small circle – bored)
– those which have the most negative emotions (big square – sad)
– those which have the least negative emotions (small square – chill)
Then I ranked them according to the World Happiness Report. I did not see any serious contradictions between these two data sets, except one country – Lithuania is quite high on happiness score, but very low on positive experiences, so it is the most bored happy country in the world.
What: Positive and Negative emotions indices based on interviews and Happiness index also based on interviews.
When: 2018
Where: 43 countries of the world
Source: Gallup for emotions and WHR for happiness
Did membership in EU helped new countries to grow their GDP faster?
The graph tells me that further analysis would be purposeless. For most countries, which entered EU in 2004 the fifth year in the union was the time of global crisis. Would have they been better without EU? Well, this is a topic for a deeper analysis.
What: The graph shows 3-year moving averages of annual GDP per capita growth, with value at year 0 (entering the EU) subtracted from all the data series for visual purposes. The “average” is a simple average of all growths without the topmost and downmost values.
When: Years are different for each country depending on its date of joining the European Union.
Where: Countries joined the EU in 2004 and later.
Source: ES