Tag: human progress

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Air Pollution is getting worse. No it really isn’t!

Originally posted to LinkedIn on October 26, 2022

A student today told me that air pollution was up. The fact is, that is not even close to the truth. Typically students (and many people) lean toward the pessimistic. It is little wonder with the constant blaring of bad news and fear-mongering from those whose agenda is attracting eyeballs or votes (or both). The truth, however, is a stubborn thing, but it is not always front and center.

Check out this graph from the US EPA from their report on Air Quality (https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary, accessed October 26, 2022).


Source: EPA.gov image source https://www.epa.gov/system/files/images/2022-06/1970-2021%20Baby%20Graph_1.png

From 1970, aggregate emissions from 6 common pollutants are down 78%. CO2 alone is down 9%.

At the same time, we consumed 43% more energy, had a 62% growth in population, almost a 200% increase in miles traveled by gas-powered vehicles, and nearly a 300% growth in GDP. At the same time, our standard of living (measured by real GDP per capita) rose 244%. (source US BEA)

Most would conclude, I would observe, that with population and vehicle miles and GDP rising, of course, air quality has to suffer. But that is not the case. Why are people so pessimistic? The evidence everywhere is that the world improves.  

I am not trying to simplify or dismiss real problems, but I am pointing out that the US is one of the world’s best examples of clean air. As countries get rich, they can spend more on cleaning their environment.

Ourworldindata.com says, “Death rates from air pollution are highest in low-to-middle income countries, with more than 100-fold differences in rates across the world.” Air quality is a normal good. As incomes rise and residents can move beyond mere survival demands, it becomes something they will demand. (https://ourworldindata.org/air-pollution).

The following graph shows worldwide death rates due to air pollution on the vertical axis. As countries become rich, they can afford to demand clean air. In the first graph below, countries defined as low-income are shown. The trend is downward for indoor air pollution, but the death rate due to all air pollution stands at 189 per 100,000 residents.

In the second graph, a similar trend is shown for countries the world bank classifies as rich, showing death rates from air pollution is falling. In 2019 the death rate from all air pollution in these high-income countries is 15 per 100,000 residents or less than 8 percent of the low-income countries. In other words, low-income countries, as of 2019, have shown a great reduction in air pollution deaths over time but have a death rate of almost 13 times the high-income countries.

When a country becomes richer, air quality gets better.

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Economic Freedom: Solve Problems, Tell Stories

Time and time again we hear employers wanting two qualities out of their data scientists, be able to solve problems and tell stories. How important is economic freedom? Does it lead to greater standards of living? The answer can be shown in tables of results well laid out, but visualizing those results has an even greater impact and better tells the story.

If a “picture is worth a thousand words” then a SAS SGPLOT is worth many pages of tables or results. Can you see the story here?

Economic Freedom is shown to be associated with ever higher standards of living across countries.

The problem is whether countries with higher levels of economic freedom also have higher standards of living. It appears that is true. The association seems undeniable. Is it causal? That is another question that the visual begs. Chicken and Egg reasoning doesn’t seem likely here. It does appeal that the association is one way. For that to be established, we have to answer is economic freedom necessary for higher standards of living. And we have to determine that if the economic freedom had not been accomplished would the standard of living not been as high.

More on that in a future post on the importance of “why.” For now, enjoy the fact that their seems to be a key to make the world better off. Oh, not just from this graph, but from countless successes in countries in the past. My undergraduate analytic students are expanding on this finding to see if their choices from the 1600 World Development Indicators of the World Bank hold up in the same way as GDP per-capita does here in this graph. We/they modify the question to “Do countries that have higher economic freedom also have greater human progress?” I am anxious to see what they find.

The Economic Freedom data comes to us from The Heritage Foundation. Let me know what you think about the visual.

This is a followup to my post on my blog at econdatascience.com “Bubble Chart in SAS SGPLOT like Hans Rosing.”

The SAS PROC SGPLOT code to create the graph is on my GITHUB repository. It makes use of Block command for the banding and selective labeling based on large residuals from a quadratic regression. The quadratic parametric regression and the loess non-parametric regression are to suggest the trend relationship.

Sorry Data not included.

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Bubble Chart in SAS SGPLOT like Hans Rosing

Robert Allison blogs as the SAS Graph Guy. He recreates using SAS PROC SGPLOT the famous bubble chart from Hans Rosing of Gapminder Institute. Hans shows that life expectancy and income per person have dramatically changed over the years. Because Hans Rosing is a ot the father of visualizations, Robert produces this graph (shown here) and this very cool animation.

I can’t wait to see  Economic Freedom and income per person soon in one of these graphs. My students are trying to do this right now.  At this point in the term they are acquiring two datasets from Heritage on 168 countries, which contain the index of economic freedom for 2013 and 2018. Then they are cleaning and joining them so they can reproduce the following figure and table in SAS PROC SGPLOT for each year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have written about this project in prior terms here. Once they have this data joined and the above figures reproduced then they will move on to the final project for this semester. They will be looking through the 1600 World Development Indicators of the World Bank.  Each team of students will choose 5 and will join that to their data to answer the question:

Does Economic Freedom lead to greater Human Progress?

I may share their results, for now this is some pretty cool graphics from the SAS Graph Guy. 

 

 

 

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Poverty Progress

Between 1980 and today the world is getting better, humans are making amazing progress. 

GDP per-capita in the US rose from $28,590 to $54,542, almost doubling as measured in 2010 dollars.

Worldwide, extreme poverty fell by over half as measured by the world bank.  (42 percent of the world’s population was in extreme poverty in 1981, but by 2015 only 9.9% of the world was in that state).

The number of wage salary workers that are paid at or below the federal minimum wage in the US fell from 15% to 2%.

The US Official Rate of Poverty rose by 0.5 percentage points.

Wait. What?

The world is improving even if you don’t think so.

Ask your friends about the drop in extreme poverty. I bet most get it wrong. My evidence is from the Misconception Study conducted by Gapminder Foundation. In fact, take their test to see how many misconceptions you have about the world. (It is right on the front page at https://www.gapminder.org/). Out of 12 questions administered to thousands across the world, the average score for every group is less than if the answer had been chosen by random. 

Once misconception is the world is getting worse, when indeed it is really getting much much better. But stories of better do not lead the news, only stories of woe. Further if you got your education in the 70s and 80s as I did you may have many misconceptions simply because you believe data learned correctly then has not changed. 

Why has the official poverty rate not fallen with all this world wide progress?

If world extreme poverty is down, why is the US official poverty rate so flat, nearly the same now as almost 50 years ago? The first problem is world wide poverty is bench marked on an absolute income standard. The OPR in the US is a relative income standard. They measure very different things. 

The second problem is income is the wrong measure for poverty. Using bad measures of important concepts like poverty creates a misconception that the problem is much worse and virtually unsolvable and attracts policy prescriptions to do exactly the wrong thing. 

The World Bank expects Extreme Poverty to essentially vanish by 2030. The US government has made no such forecast by any year in the future. 

 

What is the better measure of US poverty?

Meyer and Sullivan track what it costs to consume at a level not to be in poverty, that is, to create a consumption poverty rate (CPR) that is shown on the last track. The better question is not do the US poor have enough income, but do they have enough consumption? Without getting into what poverty programs are good and bad, the case of food stamps, now SNAP, is such instructive. Take two families with identical income and one of them received one or more consumption based forms of assistance such as SNAP and clearly one is relatively better off. The OPR does no consider any assistance to the people in poverty that they measure. 

But a goal to eradicate poverty needs to be based against an absolute standard with policy clearly targeting families to get them across that standard. We do not want people deprived. It is not about income, its about existence beyond deprivation. 

One of the reasons for the consumption poverty rate (CPR)  is consumption is a better predictor of deprivation than income. (Perhaps two people have the same income, but one cannot afford to put good food on the table, who is worse off?).

You can find their excellent paper here (https://leo.nd.edu/assets/249750/meyer_sullivan_cpr_2016_1_.pdf)

To listen to the news media and the advocacy groups everything is a crisis and a disaster and the world and the US is getting worse. The nice thing about data is it proves the obverse, the world and the US is getting better at a rate begun in about 1980 that is astonishing. But good news does not bleed and therefore will not lead.

So here is what is remarkable: From 1980 to 2015 the consumption poverty rate fell by 9.4 percentage points, while the official poverty rate rose by 0.5 percentage points.

So what make more sense, that the US has a poverty rate of 13.5 (in 2015) that is virtually impossible to lessen or eliminate, or a Poverty rate based on consumption that is 3.5% of the population that we might be able to further reduce.  

I would like to see the end of poverty wouldn’t you? 

Be a Data Skeptic and do your own research

We hear constantly about bias reporting and fake news and you should be motivated to be skeptical about any data you hear reported and motivated to search out the actual facts.

In other cases, such as the FBI’s hate crime data, the data are not reliable without understanding how it is collected. The data is fine, but year to year comparisons are not easily possible because of the data design. (see The importance of data skepticism. Hate crimes did not rise 17% in one year. )

Many data websites do exist to help you find actual facts. 

Some of the best fact based sites are
https://Justfacts.org
https://Gapminder.org
https://Fred.org
https://humanprogress.org.

So the message is be humble, don’t believe everything at face value and learn how and do your own research.