5 most important graphs of the day

1. There are fewer Americans identifying themselves as "Christian" (and "religious"). Source: The Economist.

2. Some evidence that innovation and religiosity are inversely related. Source: The Economist.

3. The share of food eaten outside home has now exceed the share of food eaten at home (at least in the US). Source: Carpe Diem blog.

4. Current and future world economic development in one graph.

5. Direction of illegal migration into Europe. Source: The Economist.

Summarizing the middle-income (country) trap or MIT

From The Economist:

Economists on the hot seat

Data "scraping" and Argentinian prices

From the Conversable Economist:

Researchers can create their own data sets by "scraping" the web: that is, by writing programs that will download data from various websites at regular intervals. One of the best-known of these projects is the Billion Prices Project run by Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon at MIT. Their program downloads detailed data on prices and product characteristics from websites all over the world every day on hundreds of thousands of products. For a sense of the findings that can emerge from this kind of study, here's one graph showing the US price level as measured by the Billion Prices Project and the official Consumer Price Index. They are fairly close. Next look at the price level from the Billion Prices Project and the official measure of inflation in Argentina. It's strong publicly available evidence that the government in Argentina is gaming its inflation statistics.

Summary of the peer review process

From here.