Friday's Notes

The universities of Michigan's and Sheffield's Worldmapper has nearly 600 world maps or cartograms. On them, each country is scaled in size by"their demographic importance on a vast range of subjects ..., from population, health, wealth and occupation to how many toys we import and who's eating their vegetables." Here, for instance, is the world by population in the year"1 AD Gregorian calendar, 3761 Hebrew calendar, 7.17.18.13.3 Mayan calendar, 544 Buddhist calendar." Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford, The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live reproduces 366 of the maps between hard covers.

The Gallup Poll puts presidential election polling in historical perspective with its graphic of polling results in the run-up to November elections from 1936 to 2004. Hat tip.

Joseph E. Stiglitz,"Reversal of Fortune," Vanity Fair, November, foresees a grim economic prospect for the United States. His lede:

When the American economy enters a downturn, you often hear the experts debating whether it is likely to be V-shaped (short and sharp) or U-shaped (longer but milder). Today, the American economy may be entering a downturn that is best described as L-shaped. It is in a very low place indeed, and likely to remain there for some time to come.

Virtually all the indicators look grim. Inflation is running at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent, its highest level in 17 years. Unemployment stands at 6 percent; there has been no net job growth in the private sector for almost a year. Housing prices have fallen faster than at any time in memory—in Florida and California, by 30 percent or more. Banks are reporting record losses, only months after their executives walked off with record bonuses as their reward. President Bush inherited a $128 billion budget surplus from Bill Clinton; this year the federal government announced the second-largest budget deficit ever reported. During the eight years of the Bush administration, the national debt has increased by more than 65 percent, to nearly $10 trillion (to which the debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae should now be added, according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile, we are saddled with the cost of two wars. The price tag for the one in Iraq alone will, by my estimate, ultimately exceed $3 trillion.

Finally, yet once again, the Ig Nobel Prize committee has Ig Nored history. Only once in the Ig Nobel Awards' 18 years has it recognized a historian. In 2005, James Watson of Massey University in New Zealand won a prize for his study,"The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers." There's a lot of Im Probable research in history that's going Un Recognized!