Six-Chart Sunday (#15) – Ivies Aren't Real Life
6 Infographics from the week + 1 interview (CBO Director Phillip Swagel on the national debt)
Twitter’s Not Real Life, and Neither Are the Ivies: “At the Ivy and “Ivy Plus” schools, liberals outnumber conservatives by a ratio of approximately 5:1, including by as high as 11:1 at Brown at 9:1 at Penn. The rest of American society just isn’t anything like this. Among American women aged 18-29, liberals outnumber conservatives, but only by about 2:1. Among young American men, there are actually more conservatives than liberals.” (Nate Silver)
Mind the End Game: “About one-third of all S&P 500 stock trades are now executed in the final 10 minutes of the 390 minute trading day, up from 27% in 2021, according to data compiled by BestEx Research, a developer of trading algorithms.” (BestEx Research via Bloomberg)
Red Storm Rising: The true size of the Chinese military budget is roughly $700 billion, triple Beijing’s publicly stated military spending top-line of $229 billion and nearly equal to U.S. defense spending. (AEI)
CEO Departures Accelerating: 622 CEOs have announced their departures in Q1 2024, the highest quarterly total on record. That’s up 49% from the 418 exits in the first quarter of last year, and up 27% from the 489 CEO exits in Q4 2023. (Challenger Gray & Christmas)
Sustained Start-Up Surge Promises More Productivity: The pandemic-initiated surge in new business creation across the country is persisting after an extended decline in U.S. business dynamism. “Over the prior several decades, the number of U.S. start-ups almost continuously fell as older, larger companies dominated — a trend that economists linked to stalled productivity. Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of productivity growth because these companies bring innovations to the market and drive competition, which in turn forces larger, incumbent companies to become more productive or lose market share.” (WaPo)
Practice Made Perfect: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got a C+ grade in public speaking in 1948… proving either that professors have no idea what they’re talking about, or that even the greatest of all time needed 10,000 hours of practice to get to the promised land. (h/t @donnelly_brent, a great Twitter follow!)
VIDEO
Dr. Phillip Swagel, Director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, on America’s national debt challenge.