Economic Rigor

With all the talk of the budget's effect on the poor, I was curious what sort of impact another recession might cause to incomes, based on the affect of the recession in 2008/2009 and income growth before that vs income growth after. If you look at the 13 years before (and including 2007-2008) we had the below income growth (compounding) per year for the following quintiles Lowest quintile : 3.95% Second quintile : 3.75% Third quintile : 3.62% Fourth quintile : 3.08% Highest quintile : 4.71% After the recession and including the 17 years before (and including 2011-2012) we had the below income growth (compounding) Lowest quintile : 2.51% Second quintile : 2.77% Third quintile : 2.69% Fourth quintile : 2.67% Highest quintile : 3.10% So as a result of the recession, we have the following drop in the growth of incomes 1.61% Highest quintile 1.44% Lowest quintile 0.98% Second quintile 0.93% Third quintile 0.41% Fourth quintile So if the rich can affo...

Well, Bill did his reply...almost 600 more words than Hockey and a load more retorical questions. Got sick of replacing question marks in my word cloud code :-) Anyway, top 10 nouns in the cloud (i'm taking the Budget as a noun) Budget - 49 times Prime -  35 times Australia - 34 times Australians - 30 times Labor - 28 times Minister - 26 times People - 23 times Australian - 21 times Family - 17 times Government - 15 times Contrast this to the top 10 nouns of Hockey's speech Government - 30 times Budget - 29 times People - 21 times Billion - 20 times Year - 17 times Years - 12 times Australia - 11 times Family - 11 times Nation - 11 times Research - 11 times So we have the common words Government Budget People Australia Family Which leaves the Govenment focussed on Billion, Year, Years, Nation and Research vs Labor's Prime, Australians, Labor, Minister, Australins. Do you think Bill is focussed more on the Prime Minister, that he (Shorten...

Been running my word clouder over the Treasurer's budget speech....did you know "Will" was mentioned 83 times! That's a lot of will. Other interesting results "Government" mentioned 30 times "Budget" 29 times "Build" 22 times "People" 21 times "Billion" 20 times "new" 17 times "now" 17 times Contrast this with Wayne Swans last budget in 2013. "Economy" mentioned 29 times "Billion" 27 times "Australia" 26 times "Speaker" 23 times "Will" 22 times "Tonight" 21 times "Budget" 20 times "Million" 20 times So what can we say about the two speeches. Hockey is all about the Governments Budget, that it is new, its going to build stuff and is happening now and they Will do stuff. Wayne Swan was all about the economy, focused on the dollars and talking to the speaker that night , rather than the people. And ...

Been playing around with VBA in excel trying to create word clouds and the like. One of the areas I have been focusing on is the Monetary Policy releases from the RBA. Trying to detect changes in tone etc to see if I can accurately predict the next move in interest rates from the language. Couple of interesting things from the last three months. 1. The RBA seems to be focusing on more local issues now...in the May RBA release, there is no mention of another country except China, as opposed to March and April which mentioned the Euro Zone and the US. 2. A lot more present tense use. Less waiting for something to happen and now more is happening. 3. Number of words in the statements are increasing. From 428 words in March to 486 in May. Trying to justify it's lack of movement perhaps 4. "Fragile" has disappeared from the word list and "Strong" has now appeared 5. Using a very basic weighting system assigned to each word to reflect a "positive...

Using the same methodology as the previous posts, I wanted to see what were the top 10 box office bombs...those movies with a budget of $100 million or more (in 2013 equivalent dollars) that had the worse profitability. And here they are... 1. The Adventures of Pluto Nash 2. Heavens Gate 3. Mars needs Moms 4. The Postman 5. Hudson Hawk 6. Timeline 7. Virus 8. Red Planet 9. The 13th Warrior 10. Son of the Mask Quality list of the dodgiest movies of all time!

Being a big fan of movies, I stumbled upon some data from Nate Silvers blog (fivethirtyeight.com). Basically gave you a list of around 1600 movies since the 1970's and their budgets and revenues (and also adjusted to 2013 dollars so you could do an accurate comparison). So using this data you could actually get the gross profits over a period of time for a lot of movies. Now I was interested in the most profitable movies based on revenue per dollar of budget. (sort of an inverse gross profit ratio). Surprising figures really..all the big movies aren't really in the list, due to those large budgets. The top 10 most profitable movies are, in order from most profitable are :- Paranormal Activity The Blair Witch Project El Mariachi The Texas Chain Saw Massacre The Towering Inferno Rocky American Graffiti Clerks. The Rocky Horror Picture Show In the Company of Men Horror seems to be the best option really, with 4 in the top 10. Paranormal Activity made $610 rev...