In this first ever guest post on The Stubborn Mule, Mark Lauer takes a careful look at the relationship between national development and fertility rates. Recently The Economist and the Washington Post reported a research paper in Nature on the relationship between development and fertility across a large number of countries. The main conclusion of […]
I never formally studied any economics at school or university, but in the years since I have become increasingly interested in the subject. I am sure that is evident from many of the posts here on the Stubborn Mule. What I did study was mathematics and, although there can be internal debates within the subject […]
Today I attended a presentation by TD Securities global strategist Stephen Koukoulas. While exploring the “green shoots” of recovery, Koukoulas made an interesting observation about China. Many observers of the Australian economy, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens included, place great weight on the importance of China for Australia’s economy. But Koukoulas pointed out that, while […]
I will freely admit that I am now going overboard, but commenter Lettuce All Rejoice asked what the Rudd word cloud would look like if it was broken down into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Fortunately, the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group make a statistical parser freely available for download. So, I used this to parse […]
My last post looked at the favourite words of Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd. In the interests of balance, I will now turn the word cloud lens onto the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull’s speeches are conveniently assembled online and the graphic below illustrates the frequency of his words from speeches made in 2009. Unlike […]
Last week, Politico published an analysis of Barack Obama’s language. The words he used most often were “America”, “Health” and “Economy” (Politico included “American” in the count along with “America”). This prompts the obvious question: what are the favourite words of our own Kevin Rudd? Fortunately, the prime minster’s website publishes transcripts of all Kevin’s […]
After reading my posts on the international arms trade, a friend thought I might be interested in some data on the international trade in fish. While I know almost as little about fish as about arms, I always welcome good data. The data in question is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of […]
My last post looked at the international arms trade. Taking data from SIPRI, I produced maps showing arms exports for a number of countries, including Australia and the USA. While these maps gave an indication of the spread of arms trading, it did not show which are the biggest overall importers and exporters of arms. […]
Following on from my post on Visualizing the Hottest 100, I noticed that the UK’s Guardian newspaper has published a list of 1000 songs to hear before you die*. The list was assembled from nominations posted by readers. Even before looking at the list, I suspected that the demographic profile of the Guardian’s readers may […]
A few weeks ago, I had a preliminary look at Australian property prices. That post focused on rental yields and argued that the fact that property prices have consisently outpaced inflation over the last 10-15 years can be associated with a steady decline in rental yields which has been matched by a decline in real […]