Oil price dashboard

For those who like to monitor world oil prices (e.g., car owners like me).

World's economic center of gravity (1 CE to 2025 CE)

Some latest figures; more here:

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.

2015 Clark Medalist: Roland Fryer Jr.

From the AEA website:

Roland Fryer is an influential applied microeconomist whose work spans labor economics, the economics of education, and social problems and social interactions.  His innovative and creative research contributions have deepened our understanding of the sources, magnitude, and persistence of U.S. racial inequality. He has made substantial progress in evaluating the policies that work and do not work to improve the educational outcomes and economic opportunities of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.  His theoretical and empirical work on the “acting white” hypothesis of peer effects provides new insights into the difficulties of increasing the educational investments of minorities and the socially excluded.  Fryer is the leading economist working on the economics of race and education, and he has produced the most important work in recent years on combating the racial divide, one of America’s most profound and long-lasting social problems.

He has mastered tools from many disciplines to tackle difficult research topics.  Fryer has developed and implemented compelling randomized field experiments in large U.S. urban school districts to evaluate education interventions.  He founded EdLabs (the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University) in 2008 to facilitate such efforts and continues as its director.  He has incorporated insights from psychology to formulate a new model of discrimination based on categorization, and he has used detailed historical archival research to understand the origins and spread of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Infographic of the day: Maritime forces

Of ASEAN countries and their neighbors. The big bully is big indeed.

Graph: Exponential growth of smartphone cameras

From here.