Language and the 18 benchmarks

Here's a link containing the language of the 18 "benchmarks" included in the recent Iraq Supplemental Bill HR 2206

Of the 18, most are not readily amenable to quantification. The short list below are 5 of the more quantifiable targets contained in these benchmarks.

More on this in future posts. For now, the supplemental bill appears to fall afoul of the same language difficulties we have been noting in various articles from around the web - namely mushy metrics, imprecise or missing quantification. If this is the document that is going to guide our evaluation of how things are really going in Iraq, we are in deep trouble as it appears to be structured in ways that are likely to defy exactly that process.

3) equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources

9) Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations.

13) Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security.

14) Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad.

15) Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces units capable of operating independently.

17) Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.

However, these 5 are amenable to quantification and we could begin now (rather than waiting till September) to make these specifics, to measure them regularly, and to report on them in a way that will be easily accessible to all.

When you look at the full text of benchmarks and at the required reporting standards and timing, it's noteworthy that there are no explicit benchmarks for what the United States is required to do in this time frame. Clearly the situation in Iraq will be dependent both on what the Iraqi government does and what the United States does, but this particular bill places all the responsibility on Iraqi shoulders.

GAO May 15 Rebuilding Iraq Report

Here's a link to the recent General Accounting Office Rebuilding Iraq Report - May 15, 1007.

Once chart I found enlightening and eye opening was their oil chart showing history covering the range of 1970 to 2005. [Click for larger image]

I also found the enemy initiated attack chart easily digestible although as I have commented before, I am not a huge fan of stacked bar charts unless there is also an easy way to look at the individual indicators.

Postponing the Moment of Truth

Check out this excellent Postponing the Moment of Truth cartoon from cartoonstock.com.

This is a perfect match to the imprecise approach, the mushy metrics, the startling lack of numerical quantification, and the complete absence of visualization as exemplified by (but certainly not limited to) Stolberg's See You In September report in the New York Times as highlighted in the previous post.

Revisiting "See You In September"

I want to return to the Sheryl Gay Stolberg article

See You in September, Whatever That Means

published in the New York Times on May 13th, 2007. There are many more important clues we can discover hiding the text. I did not have time to unravel them all during the first Charting Progress in Iraq post on this subject.

Following along the lines of the Forecast on Iraq post we'll once again de-construct and highlight some of the language and see what else that reveals. For fun, I have color coded the quoted text as follows.

Orange - vague metrics (e.g. progress, confidence, winning, losing)

Purple - vague quantification (e.g. up, down, better, more)

Green - specific metrics (e.g. sectarian murders, monthly bomb rate). Unfortunately, none of these have any specific numbers associated with them. Some have vague quantification and others have non at all.

• "decisive progress"
• "looking better"
• “Sectarian murders are down”
• "car bombings ... are up"
• "deaths of American soldiers are up"
• "some in Washington are grasping for a more complete and accurate way to quantify progress"
• “No one knows how to define progress in such a mixed-up situation”
• “We’re having trouble measuring it."
• [Iraq Index includes] "the monthly car-bomb rate"
• [Iraq Index includes] "how many foreign nationals are kidnapped"
• [Iraq Index includes] "how many Iraqis have electricity"
• [Iraq Index includes] "how many Iraqis have ... Internet access"
• [the Iraq index] "is long on numbers and short on analysis"
• "some signs of hope"
• "more grounds for worry than for confidence"
• [Rep Kingston (R-Georgia) wants to] "winnow down the indicators to a manageable number -- say, fewer than a dozen"
• [Rep Kingston (R-Georgia) wants to create] "a standard bi-partisan metric"
• [with such a metric in place] "then you could say who’s winning and losing”
• [Micheal O'Hanlon says] "metrics are grist for a fact based debate but history shows it is dangerous to rely on too few of them"
• [Micheal O'Hanlon says] "metrics were used in Vietnam and we had the wrong ones"
• [the Vietnam metrics] "did net harm to the debate"
• [Micheal O'Hanlon says] "we can’t be exactly precise about which indicators are the conclusive ones”
• "such an index would be politically unpalatable to the White House, which does not want to back itself into a corner by agreeing to someone else’s standard for progress"
• "the White House says the only progress report that counts is the one from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new top commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the new ambassador"
• "is the current strategy for waging war going well or not?"
• [Stephen Biddle] did fault the White House for not being more open with the public about its own idea of what constitutes progress
• “By being unbelievably vague about everything,” he said, “they’re making it very hard for congressmen and senators to go to their constituents and say, ‘Look, here’s why things are going better than you might imagine.’ ”
• "Some say measuring progress is simple: you will know it when you see it."
• [Metrics suggested by Senator Robert Bennett (R-Utah)] I want to see life starting to come back,” “I want to see people in markets. I want to see couples strolling down the street, folks sitting at outdoor cafes.”
• [Metrics suggested by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) ] “a significant reduction in violence and attacks accompanied by a transfer of more and more authority to the Iraqi forces.”
• [Senator Collins] “the difficult question is going to be if the analysis is mixed, and I suspect it may well be.
• [Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) says] “I don’t see any way for us to maintain a long-term presence in Iraq without more bipartisan support.”
• [Rep. Kingston] "hopes to come up with some useful way of figuring out ...whether [to] remain supportive for a little while longer"
  
• [Rep. Kingston has] " heard three years of nearly happy-talk in testimony"
• “We always seem to be about to be around this elusive corner, but we never get there.”

Bottom line:
The language we use to talk about the important aspects of our lives makes a difference. When we use language about an evolving situation this way (vague metrics coupled with imprecise quantification, and lack of any clear trend quantification and visualization), we are going to have a tough time making sense of what's actually happening, what it means, and what our best next step might be.

If we continue along this path of mushy metrics, vague quantification, and numerous instances of what appears to be learned helplessness, come September, we won't be in any better state to evaluate the situation than we are now

I have some more thoughts on some of the key quotes from above for a future post. There is a way forward that addresses Michael O'Hanlon's concerns and answers Rep. Kingston's call for assistance.

Old problems plague new security plan for Iraq

Here's an interesting post from Fort Wayne's News Sentinel:

KRT Wire 06/08/2007 Old problems plague new security plan for Iraq

The much more precise and quantified language describing the situation on the ground in Iraq in this Editorial by Nancy A. Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers stands in stark contrast to the fuzzy, imprecise, unquantified example we gave in the recent Washington Post Forecast on Iraq story.

Best to check these two articles out for yourself to see what I mean.

In the meantime, here are some actual numeric indicators from the article that will give you a flavor of what I am talking abut.

Number of bodies found on Baghdad's Streets
Troop levels numbers in Baghdad for US, Iraqi forces & Police
Number of neighborhoods under control
People killed in explosion
Number of car bombs

Having actual key measurable indicators mentioned by name and having actual data values for how these have changed over time is strikingly more informative and useful.

Is it good enough? Not nearly. It's a perfect example one interpretation of Von Clauswitz' "the better is the enemy of the good", but that's a subject for another post.

Hat tip to Juan Cole over at Informed Consent.

And kudos to Nancy Youssef for raising the bar.

Applying Trend Analysis Principles with Brilliant Effect

Buying a camera at a fair price is not particularly earth-shaking activity, especially compared to trying to figure out whether our actions in Iraq are helping or hurting.

Nevertheless, here is a simple and striking example of the power of applying the essential principles of trend analysis to the task.

Pricescan.com did a brilliant job on this in my opinion.

The red trend line represents the high price, the blue the average price, and the green the low price. Each tick mark on the X axis represents one week's time and the chart covers the period from 9/11/2006 through 6/4/2007

What did pricescan.com do right

1. they identified the most important factors (in this case the minimum, average, maximum price for the Canon PowerShot AS710 IS camera.
   
2. they collected the raw data each week of the price of this item from a range of sources
3. rather than showing the raw data, they created calculated values of High, Average, Low price for each period
4. They selected a reasonable reporting rate that fit with the data (1 week in this case) and the resulting trend lines are relatively smooth while still giving us enough data points to have confidence in our understanding of the trends we see developing. A total of approximately 38 data points are plotted for each factor.
5. their Y axis scaling fits the data and makes it possible to see the trends in all three indicators that they displayed. The scale values are also easy to read.
6. they are reporting their data in near real time. The most recent data point is only 5 days ago.
   
7. They showed the entire time period ( I am guessing from product introduction right up through last Monday)

And of course, they visualized this data for us rather than telling us about it or showing us a table of 100+ numbers.

Armed with this easy to read chart, anyone interested in purchasing the Canon PowerShot AS710 camera in the next week or so will know whether the offering price is within a reasonable range and can then get on to evaluating the other factors that might impact their buying decision.

This example stands in stark contrast to the most approaches to other important areas of our lives as exemplified in yesterday's Iraq Forecast post. There are no mushy metrics or imprecise quantification or flowery metaphors. There's no postponing the moment of truth cop-outs saying we don't know exactly what the future will bring. Of course we don't know exactly. We never do.

They don't say: "we can't really tell you whether the price of this item is going to become more affordable by September".

There's just the relevant facts that help deal with the specific situation.

My two cents: the better we learn how to apply this kind of approach to the most important problems in our lives, the quicker we will begin to gain control of what's happening.

Washington Post. Forecast on Iraq

Today's Washington Post featured this story with quotes from Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute, the new White House War coordinator (previously know as War Czar):

Nominee to Coordinate War Offers Grim Forecast on Iraq - washingtonpost.com

Here are some quotes relating to assessment of current trends and the direction we are heading. Bold emphasis has been added.

Lute said:

Iraqi factions have shown so far very little progress ... we're not likely to see much difference in the security situation" a year from now.

A CIA expert on radical Islam was quoted by Senator Bayh saying:

our presence in Iraq is creating more members of al-Qaeda than we are killing in Iraq.

The Post noted that the recently passed supplemental funding legislation

requires progress reports from the administration in July and September.

Here are some trend related quotes.

While insisting that incremental progress is being made, administration officials acknowledge that the benchmarks will be all but impossible to meet by the time progress reports are due to Congress.

"If the test is peace and reconciliation and flowers blooming by September, that will be hard to meet," said a senior administration official.

At the least, the administration hopes to be able to demonstrate movement in the right direction.

There has been little progress in four key political areas

At his hearing yesterday, Lute acknowledged that during a review of U.S. policy on Iraq last winter, he had privately expressed skepticism of Bush's "surge" proposal unless matched with more robust efforts by the Iraqis and other U.S. agencies.

"Where are we today?" he [Lute] asked. "Not where any of us would like."

Notice anything here?

Or rather do you notice anything missing here?

There's nary a single number and all the key factors and indicators referenced with regard to progress are not the kind that can normally be quantified. There's also no sense of any of these indicators changing step by step over time.

Let's list them so you can see what I mean.

Here are the metrics discussed in the article

1. "progress"
2. "the security situation"
3. number of members of al-Qaeda created
4. number of members of al-Qaeda killed in Iraq
5. "peace"
6. "reconciliation"
7. "flowers blooming"
8. "movement in the right direction"
9. more robust efforts by the Iraqis
10. more robust efforts by other US agencies
11. progress in four key political areas"
    

• Revisit constitution to better balance power sharing
  
• Oil revenue sharing
• provincial elections
• de-Baathifcation

And equally challenging to actually being able to use these trends to help steer our course forward is the mushy nature of the current "values" of these important indicators:

1. very little
2. not much difference
3. incremental
4. hard to meet
5. movement
6. little
7. more

Contrast the lack of quantification and therefore the lack of clarity with the numerical metrics we discussed in our series of posts yesterday such as:

• peak megawatt hours
• millions of barrels of oil per day
• Iraqi prison population
  

The one bit of good news mentioned is that a progress report from the administration is due in July so at least we won't have to wait for September for that. How much we learn in July will depend an awful lot on whether the progress is report is based on hard metrics with clear quantification or on the kind of mushy, mostly unquantifiable indicators we find the WaPo report.

What direction are we moving?

From Chart of the Day's - www.chartoftheday.com: "Quote of the Day

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.' - Oliver Wendell Holmes"

And the best way to have a good sense of what direction we are moving is to examine (in near real time and with high resolution) the trend data for the most important factors and indicators at work in whatever situation we find ourselves.

What could be simpler than that?

Why Wait Till September in Iraq

We Don't Have To Wait. There's a dangerous meme circulating that says we have to wait till September before we can learn whether the "surge" in Iraq is working. This, in my opinion is simply not true.

Many dimensions of the current situation in Iraq can and are being measured and reported on in near real time. The work of Michael O'Hanlon on the weekly Iraq Index at the Brookings Institution is one excellent proof that it is possible to know were we stand literally week by week and even day by day.

Digestible Trend Data. One principal area where we are not as good as we need to be today is in making sure that the trend data that exists is readily available in a form that is digestible by the intended audience. This intended audience includes the Congress, the main stream news media, the blogosphere, and especially ordinary citizens. Some really important data such as the example of Iraqi prison population that we showed in a post earlier today may only appear in tables. My guess is that most people are not willing or able to get what they need directly from the Iraq Index or similar reports. Those who are willing and able may not have nearly enough time. We can and must make it easier so that more citizens can be included in the process.

Assembling All Key Factors in One Place. A second principal impediment is that that the data is dispersed among many sources. We need to pull it all together so that each of us then becomes able to make a reasoned evaluation of how we are doing right now (without waiting till September) . My efforts at assembling some key trend graphs in a series of posts today and in the summary zip file is a small demonstration of what is possible.

Identifying and Acquiring Any Missing but Still Important Factors. A third thing holding us back from being able to evaluate for ourselves how things are going right now is that some key factors are not being reported in easily findable places.

Twenty First Century Visualization Tools. The fourth factor limiting our possibilities today is that most trend data is presented statically. This severely limits the number of factors that an ordinary person is going to be willing and able to look at to only a handful. On the other hand, with a modern Trend Visualization Viewing Station on the order of what's already available for stock market data from the likes of Big Charts or Prophet Net means that ordinary folk can look at and understand dozens and dozens of factors in a very short space of time.

We Don't Have to Wait. All these difficulties that are blocking us can be remedied without waiting till September. Our failure to remedy them over the past four years meant that it took that long for it to sink in that what we were doing wasn't really working. It's easy to posture that everything is ok when there is no hard data to prove you wrong.

In fact, if we don't begin to remedy them now, we will be in the same boat come September. We will find that we still do not have our arms around the entire situation. The facts we need will still not have been assembled and reported in an easily digestible way. And it will still be way too easy to claim that things are going well, or that we still don't know enough to tell.

Anyone interested in helping blast our way through these obstacles to understanding where we are in near real time, please let me know so we can join forces and see if we can make a difference.

The Data is Out There. Let's go get it and assemble it and make it easy to use and then share it with all interested parties.

Full List of Today's Iraq Trend Charts Contained in Composite Zip File

Here's a screen shot showing the list of JPG and GIF files contained in the composite zip file showing all the Iraq trends that we posted about today.

The first five are from the Inspector General's report (001 to 005).

The next five are from the State Department report. (101-105)

The Deja Vu (#200) slide is from the State Dept Dec 204 report via the Matthew Yglesias post .

slides 201 -209 are from the Brookings report.



slides 301-305 were generated with TLViz using tabular data from the Brookings report.

You can find the composite zip file here.

Slide Show Viewing of Today's Trends

We've covered quite a bit of ground today by reviewing several important documents that have included graphical representations of the trends at work in Iraq today.

We looked at:

1. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's April 2007 Report to Congress
   
2. The Dept. of State's Iraq Weekly Status Report for May 30th, 2007
3. A Matthew Yglesias blog post on Electricity goals from Dept of State's December 2004 Iraq Weekly Status and compared it to the most recent data on the same electricity factor from the most recent report.
   
4. The most recent Iraq Index from Michael O'Hanlon at Brookings Institution
5. Additional troop strength charts created from Tabular data in the Iraq Index report

One of the things I have noticed about blogspot blogging is that while it is easy to upload graphics and embed them in a blog post, it is difficult/impossible to retain useful control over size or placement. The maximum blog spot size usually doesn't do justice to the trend charts that I wish to present. That means that to look at a whole series of slides in a single one of my posts, the reader has to click on each one, and then click to close the window and return to the post. This is time consuming and not particularly pleasant in my mind.

down the road, I will be exploring what other blog posting capabilities are available that will let me present the data laid out the way I want it. In the meantime, I have assembled all 26 jpg and gif charts into a single zip file that I posted here in my data download area.

Once you unzip to a directory of your choice, you can enjoy a full size slide show with your favorite slide viewer - for example, Microsoft Office Picture Manager or IRFANVIEW.

I'd like to hear back whether you think this represents a useful, time saving approach for you. I am interested in learning whether you find having all the trend graphs assembled in one place makes reading them and understanding them more rapid than when looking at the individual reports. And finally, I would enjoy discovering how much value you think is added by combining charts from a wide range of resources and pulling them together in one place.

Turning the Tables

Some important data in the Brookings' Iraq Index only appears in tables (e.g. the prison population data we mentioned in the previous post). Troop strength for US forces and for other Coalition forces may be interest now because of the "surge" in in US Forces that is now reaching its stated goals. However, the troop strength trend data in the most recent report is tabular.

So we turned the tables and transformed it into a small CSV file and created some new charts (see below) using the TLViz interactive trend visualization tool.

If you would like to take a look at the CSV file yourself, you can download it from Troop Strength Table. This table includes three original trends from the Brookings' table (US Troop Strength, Other Coalition Troop Strength, and Total Coalition Force Troop Strength). To that, we have added two calculated trends. The first shows Other Coalition Troop Strength as percentage of Total Troop Strength. The second shows the ratio of US Troop Strength to a nominal value of 135,000.

If you haven't already tried out the TLViz tool that runs on Microsoft Windows as a way for looking at two dimensional tables of trend data, here's another chance. Get started by downloading the base kit. Once you have installed the base kit, you can grab the latest version of TLViz.

If you want to learn more about TLViz, check out some of our earlier posts on the subject starting in chronological order with the ones from early January.


This first chart shows a sharp downtrend in other Coalition forces dropping in half from 25,000 to 12,000 since January 2005.

This chart shows US Troop strength from the beginning of the war. While the uptick since January is sharp, the current level of US troops is not far from the middle of the range it has been operating in for the past 3 years.

This is a chart using the calculated value showing the Other Coalition forces as a percentage of total troop strength. There has been a sharp decline over the past 3 years from a maximum of 17 percent down to the current value of approximately 7.5%.

This is another calculated chart showing how US troop strength has fluctuated around the 135,000 mark for the past few years. The current peak is lower than the two previous peaks.

The final chart shows total coalition forces in Iraq over the past 4 years. The current value of 160,000 looks like it is right in the middle of the operational range for this factor since the beginning of the war.

Iraq Index from Brookings Inst.

Here is a sampling of what I think are the most important trend charts from the Brookings Institution's June 4th edition of Michael O'Hanlon's Iraq Index. This weekly report is still covers the widest range of Iraq trend metrics in a single place that I know of. Many of these are displayed in trend charts. Other important metrics appear in tabular form or in text description. Check out the whole report (60+ pages) for all the details.

Chart 1 - Iraqi Military and Police appear to be becoming more involved in recent months based on this chart showing their fatality rate rising.

Chart 2 - Slight downturn overall recently but still high. I would prefer to see these three factors separately so I could discern individual trends. Would also be useful to be able to normalize a given category's rate as a percentage of the total rate of attack. Rich data such as these are good when presented statically, but even better when there is a chance to interact with them (e.g. as we did in yesterday's post showing the Wall Street Journal's interactive chart on housing trends).


This chart shows the recent rapid ramp up in security stations and outposts


Stacked bars can be interesting. In addition, it regularly proves helpful to be able to examine the individual components.

This data looks like it is a very important dis-aggregation that will bring added insight to what's going on. It would be great if the data from previous years could be reconstructed and added to give more perspective.
This important chart covers the full period from the beginning of the war. My own preference would be to drop the labels with the totals for each month. I think these clutter up the chart and would be best to keep in a table for those who are interested. Since the month to month is so variable, a 3 or 4 month moving average might be a useful addition. My own preference would be to plot the non-hostile fatalities separately for greater clarity regarding any trends that might be present in that data. The disparity of scale between the two factors makes interpretation of the smaller values more difficult.

Another important chart which also covers the full time range since the beginning of the war. I believe a moving average would also help present this data more thoroughly.

While his data on the growing prison population is important and seriously under-reported elsewhere, it only appears as a table in this month's report. A chart for this factor would prove even more helpful. In addition, it would be useful to know the trends in other related criminal justice factors such as:

• number in custody who have been charged and indicted
• number currently undergoing trial
• number found guilty, sentenced and serving time
• number awaiting indictment
• number awaiting trial
• average number of months before indictment/trialAnother full time period chart. The pair of factors and the dual y axis work well together in this case. My view is that a moving average would be helpful in this situation as well.
  

Timelines in the News - Deja Vu

Here's a post on Electric Goalposts from Matthew Yglesias from December 8th, 2004 commenting on the electricity trends contained in the State Departments Weekly Iraq Status Report dated December 1st, 2004.

The money quote is:

But for goalposts purposes, let's note that we are not now at the goal, have never been at the goal, and are not even moving in the direction of the goal. Instead, Iraqis have less electricity (but way more phone lines, interestingly enough) than they had before the war.

Here's the chart from December 1, 2004 followed by the one from May 30th 2007. Not much seems to have changed in the intervening 30 months.


I found the commentary added into the first chart to be most helpful and useful as an aid to understanding what was really happening. A picture is worth a thousand words but even so, many time a few extra words can add even more value.


Both these charts rate high because they show a complete time range. Of course, it would sure be interesting to see what the Iraqi electricity chart looked like starting back in 1980 so that the effects of the first Gulf War when, if memory serves, severe damage was done to the Iraqi infrastructure. It would be useful to compare the recovery or non-recovery following that war to the current recovery. If anyone has that data, please let me know.

Iraq Weekly Status Report May 30, 2007

Here are some charts taken from the Department of State's May 30th, 2007 Iraq Weekly Status Report.

This first chart covers from January 2004. It appears as if demand is rising while production is falling and cannot seem to crack the 100,000 mark.

Also notice the sharp downward spikes for the light blue daily supply data. This tells me that it would be worthwhile to be able to zoom in on the supply factor and look at how supply is changing over time but using a much higher resolution than daily. An hourly trend chart for month's worth of data, or a daily chart using a 1 minute resolution would surely reveal some insights not currently available.

Similarly, when an aggregate trend factor show such sharp variation, it is frequently the case that creating additional trend charts that dis-aggregate the data can prove most helpful in understanding more fully what is happening.


This second chart makes it clear that the Iraqi currency has strengthened relative to the dollar over the past 12 months.


This third chart clearly shows the rising trend in Iraqi Commercial Bond interest rates over the past year.

This fourth chart suffers from showing far too brief a time period of only the most recent 10 weeks. Contrast this to the Oil Production chart in the previous post that showed the past 4 years and also provide useful trend data for production from the North and from the South.


This chart also has a much short sweep of time than needed for understanding the underlying trends. The related chart in the previous post showed refinery trends going back 4 years. This chart does have the positive feature that it groups all the bars for a given type of refined product together which is an improvement over the way the bars were used in the previous post from the Reconstruction report to Congress.


It's curious to note that there are no trend charts in this report from the State Department that show trends related to the first two "key areas identified as pillars of US government policy for victory in Iraq." Namely,

1. "Defeat the terrorists and neutralize the insurgents"
2. "Transition Iraq to security self reliance."
   

The trends in these areas are however dealt with in Michael O'Hanlon's weekly report from the Brookings Institution. We will be commenting on the May 30th version of that excellent report in our next post.

Iraq Reconstruction April 2007 Report to Congress

From the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction's April 2007 report to Congress, here are some useful trend charts selected from their List of Figures page.

You can click on each chart for a larger, better view.

In this first chart, it would be interesting to break out the trend for imports separately so it could be seen more clearly.


This second chart shows substantial deterioration in average electricity load served over the past year.

In this third chart, it would again be good to separately break out the trend data for Oil Production in the North and the South to make the trends in each of these areas more clearly visible. Stacked charts often obscure the most important underlying phenomena taking place with the individual factors. A separate chart showing the percentage of total oil production accounted for by the South would also would likely be revealing.

In this fourth chart, export levels for crude have recovered to their target value in March 2007. It will be interesting to see how they progress from here on out.


In this final chart, it would be helpful in my view to show each of these factors as a separate bar chart so that the trends at work with that factor could be instantly grasped. This kind of multi-factor bar chart is much harder to understand and interpret since the trends for each factor are interspersed with bars from the other factors. When shown individually, the downward trend for each of these factors would instantly discernible. Showing data points one year apart is also not nearly as good as if each trend had been shown with month by month data points.

WSJ Housing Inventory Trends

Check out this Wall Street Journal Interactive graphic showing changes in housing inventory in the past two years. It has some useful and novel features that make exploring the 18 different cities and 3 different regions easier over the past 20 months.

Here's one of the more interesting charts that I created in just a few minutes of exploration.


For the six cities shown (Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix) the upward trends since October 2005 are plain to see.

Try it out yourself and see what you can discover.

Here are my thoughts on the pluses and minuses of these interactive chart features

On the plus side

1. A single click selects a new factor to add to the mix of factors already selected for the chart

2. When adding a new factor into the mix, it highlights that new factor on the chart and reduces the intensity of the other factors on the chart until you move the mouse over the chart again when all factors selected come into full view. This helps you lock in on the colors for the new factor before they become blended with the other factors.

3. When you move the mouse over the check box for a factor that has already been selected, that factor is highlighted against the other factors currently selected with a little pop up text box that tells you the current inventory value exactly.

4. A single click as all that's required to de-select a factor.

5. A single click for one of the three areas (East, Central, West) selects all the factors for that area. And once a whole area has been selected, a single click de-selects all factors currently checked.

6. All of the above pluses add to ease of use and time saving when exploring this data set for the most interesting and telling patterns.

On the minus side

A. Way too short a time range. To make full sense of these trends and put the recent behavior in perspective needs at least 5 years and preferably 10 to 25 years of history.

B. Some major cities that are in the top 10 in population are missing - New York, Philadelphia, and San Antonio.

C. No way to adjust Y axis scaling. This is a serious drawback. The scale runs from zero to 110 thousand which is fine for viewing the trend for Los Angeles which has a range between 45, 000 and 103,000, but it makes it difficult to grasp the trends for such cities as Minneapolis which varies from 25,000 to 31,000 or Baltimore which ranges from 5,000 to 10,000. Both of these cities look flat line during this period even though when you examine them closely they really aren't. Y axis scaling options such as the possibility of calculating the Min-Max scaling for the factors charted would help bring the trends for all cities into clear view.

D. No available view of the data using percentage change from a baseline value for determining the Y axis value. Such a normalizing option would simplify comparisons between cities.

E. No option for showing aggregate results for a region or for stacking the factors selected.

F. If you wish to look at each factor separately, it takes two clicks. One to de-select the previous factor, and one to select the new factor.

G. No option for smoothing with features such as moving averages

H. Missing trend data for other related factors for each city such as

• Inventory breakdown by New and Existing housing
  
• Average number of months houses have been on the market (total, new, existing)
• Median selling price in that market (total, new, existing)
• Rate of sales per month in that market (total, new, existing)
• Number of months of inventory at current sales rate (total, new, existing)

I. Missing option for downloading the underlying data set thereby enabling further analysis.

Hat tip to Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture

The Big Picture | Some More Housing Charts

Barry Ritholtz does it again with this excellent post which contains 4 excellent and easily readable charts on the trends affecting the housing market.

This time, Barry tells the story using pictures without commentary. The charts he selected are excellent and speak for themselves without commentary. However, Barry always adds something to the mix when he adds in his thoughts and perspectives and experience on what he sees in the charts and what it is most likely to mean.

Barry does give us a money quote with these few words to wrap up his post:

Funny thing: The charts tell pretty much the same story the words did: The housing story is only halfway done, going to get worse as time progresses. We are not anyway near a bottom in Residential Real Estate.

I do miss the words, so here are copies of the charts accompanied with my ordinary citizen, non-housing-expert comments on what they might be telling us and focusing on the degree to which these charts make best use of best practices for conveying trend results graphically.

This first chart is both interesting and scary. It would have been great to see what the Reset Amounts have been for the past 10 or 20 years rather than just the past 4 or 5 months. If I am reading this correctly, it sure looks like we are into a 12-18 month period with extremely high reset amounts, where a very small percent are for Prime ARM. Note that this chart is originally from Credite Suisse via Lamont Trading Advisers to At These Levels and then to The Big Picture.

Stacked bar charts are often difficult to use to interpret the behavior of the sub components such as Unsecuritized ARMs. Important trend information about these sub factors may be hiding in a chart such as this. My own preference in these cases is to use individual charts for each factor that I consider important so I can understand the individual behavior AND the composite behavior of all these factors.

This 3 year chart originally from Northern Trust is plain as day. Having the 20 or 25 year chart for this same key factor would have made this even better and clearer and more useful. Some smoothing, maybe a 3 month average could also be helpful here. It's important to note that this chart is based on combining two other factors - the actual total inventory of homes, and the most recent rate of sales of existing homes. For reference, having charts for these other two factors to look at in parallel to this calculated metric would also be useful.


This next chart gives us a nice 20 year view. having a complementary 3 year view would let us look more closely and better understand the very sharp recent spike.


For this next chart, my own preference would be to look at these two factors separately on their own chart first using a 20 to 25 year view.



As a general comment, having a shifting time window for every chart makes things much more difficult on the viewer.

Housing Freefall Continues Unabated

You can find some more good charts and commentary on Housing from Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture.

Here's the first chart. You won't be surprised to learn that I like the long time sweep. However, this also looks like a case where having a second, shorter term chart - maybe for the past 3 years would help us better understand the more recent behavior


In contrast, the second chart shows just the 3+ year view and presents that very well. Having a 20 year year to match the first one would have been even better.

The whole article is worth a read for the extra perspective it brings.

St. Louis Fed - National Economic Trends - June 2007

The newest edition of the always excellent National Economic Trends is available today from the St. Louis Fed.

Here are a sampling of the charts that caught my eye. Click for larger size version.

From their engaging cover article, this first chart shows the percentage of the population age 55 or over engaged in part time employment. The upward trend for women is particularly clear. The article discusses possible causes and notes areas for follow-up investigation.


This next chart shows trends in national income as a percentage of GDP.

Corporate profits weighs in at almost 14% of GDP and is close to the recently set 25 year highs. This is approximately double where it was in 1982.

Proprietor's Income registers at almost 9% of and it also is close to its 25 year highs. This is almost 50% higher than it was in 1982.

Compensation at a little over 64% of GDP is close to its 25 year lows. This is down approximately 3% from the 67% level of 1982.

The remaining National Income components (not shown) must by deduction be down net 7% from about 20% to 13%.


This third chart shows pretty clearly that the rise in corporate profits before tax is directly reflected in the rise in after tax profits as a percentage of GDP. After tax profits have more than doubled since 1982 from 4% to over 8%.


The fourth chart shows that the current account balance is close to its 25 year low at approximately 6% of GDP. Note the striking and steady downward trend since 1991.

And this final chart is noteworthy for the clarity with which it shows the rise of debt service payments to approximately 14.5% of personal income - close to the highest levels in 25 years. The steady upward trend since 1992 is also clearly visible.


Commentary.

1. As I mentioned in previous posts, one of the reasons that I value the St. Louis Fed's monthly National Economic Trends report is their use of long term trends. These help put the current behavior into perspective. The charts I have selected offer a glimpse at how a 25 year trajectory adds understanding to the most recent behavior.

2. That's not to say that their monthly report couldn't be improved. Here's my short list of suggestions on just how that might be done.

• Show all selected factors using the same long term 25 year time frame trend chart as the default setting and template.
• Show each factor on its own before combining it with other factors in a dual chart. The dual chart approach while extremely helpful for showing the possible relationship between a set of factors and simplifying comparison sometimes obscures the underlying trend in some of the factors due to the Y axis scaling used.
  
• For the single charts created for each important factor, consider using MIN-MAX scaling for the Y axis rather than zero based scaling as the default. This is not correct in every instance but it often proves useful in helping make the trend patterns easier to read and understand.
  
• Add at least some minimum commentary (could be 25 words or less) with 20% of each month's set of charts. Add comments for the charts that the St Louis Fed considers to be the most interesting and which have some interesting pattern to observe. E.g. follow the example we have set with the selected charts above. A picture is worth a thousand words, but not every important nuance seen by the expert creators of these charts will register immediately with every viewer, especially to non-expert viewers.
  
• Make it easy to download a cross-tabulated table of all the data contained in all the charts for further examination by interested parties.

Charting Progress in Iraq

This topic of determing how things are going on the ground in Iraq seems to be heating up in the last few days. See for example, Sheryl Gay Stolberg's New York Times article from May 13th - See You in September, Whatever That Means where she says:

There’s just one problem. Nobody in Washington seems to agree on what progress actually means — or how, precisely, it might be measured.

While I don't agree with that premise, the article opened up the door to a ton of worthwhile commentary - much of discussing possible factors that might be useful to gauge how things are going.

Another recent contribution to this topic was David Peck's Christian Science Monitor Article on why we need yardsticks for both success and failure in Iraq. David skillfully maps his experience with coaching leaders onto the pressing leadership issues involved in our presence in Iraq. The money quote of this article for me was:

there has never been agreement on the status of the war in Iraq because there are no agreed-upon measurements.

For some perspective from a couple of years back, and maybe to help understand how much or little forward momentum we are making in talking about progress, I also suggest you take a look at this Dan Froomkin article on Nieman Watchdog from a couple of years back (May 2005): Isn’t there some way to tell if we're winning or losing in Iraq?


We've delved into this topic in previous posts (see: Most Important Iraq Data) and we plan to revisit it again soon based on these new inputs and what seems to be a growing interest in the topic.

And of course in our opinion since what gets measured gets done and what doesn't get measured doesn't get done, this particular topic is of particular importance and relevance right now.

Hat tip to Dan Froomkin for pointing out both the referenced NY Times and the CS Monitor articles in his White House Watch Blog.

James Durso's Iraq Reconstruction News

Here's a link to an essential resource for keeping up with the trends regarding what's happening on the ground in Iraq. It's the new Iraq Reconstruction News blog created by James Durso. The links that this blog provides are to detailed resources that go far beyond the reporting one might find in the mainstream media. As I have been exploring different and complementary sources of trend data, these updates that James provides have been particularly helpful for me in locating new sources of data.

The focus of this blog is particularly on the Reconstruction aspects in Iraq. The links however often provide excellent depth on a whole host of other related topics.

James also puts out a regular set of email updates covering the same material for those who would prefer to get their news in that manner. You can find his contact info on the blog site.

Latest Brookings Iraq Index - Key Factors for Gauging the Success of the Surge

Here's the link that will always get you to the latest edition of the highly useful Brookings Institution Iraq Index that is one of the best places that I know of for learning about the trends on the ground in Iraq.

In the April 30th, 2007 edition, there is a useful essay on "Tracking the Surge" on page 4.

Unfortunately, the charts and tables that follow for the most part do not match up with the key factors noted in the essay, nor do they make it easy to for interested citizens to see the trends at work for themselves.

Here are some of the key factors that I gleaned (scraped) from the text.

1. number of US brigades in place
2. number of "joint security stations" established
3. extra-judicial killings
4. level of civil warfare
5. willingness of Shia militias to lie low
6. willingness of Sunni tribal leaders in al-Anbar to collaborate in opposing al Qaeda
7. level of violence in al-Anbar
   
8. daily attacks in and around Ramadi
9. resilience level of al Qaeda and related terrorist elements
   
10. rate of use of vehicle bombs
11. rate of use of vest bombs
12. percentage of casualties that are Shia
13. progress on the hydrocarbon law through the Iraqi parliament
14. progress towards reforming de-Bathification to allow return of lower level Baathist to public life
15. state of the Iraqi economy
16. Oil revenue received
    
17. Foreign aid received
    
18. Money available in federal coffers
19. Performance level of public utilities (presumable electricity, water, sewerage, sanitation, petrol supplies, public transportation)
20. How well schools are functioning
21. The overall state of the health system infrastructure
22. Level of unemployment

That's an awful lot of important metrics for one page of text and Michael O'Hanlon and the Brookings Institution deserve praise for consistently working to get their arms around the vast multi-dimensional range of factors at work.

And, reviewing the whole report, there are literally dozens of other important factors that show up in charts or tables.

Wishlist 1: It would be really valuable if one could turn the page of the Iraq Index report and see the chart or charts for each of the these items one by one, in the same sequence as they appeared in the essay and with the same terminology, so as to get a sense for the degree of progress that is being made, to see which things are lagging, to see what is getting worse and by how much, and so on.

This, in my mind would provide a giant step upward in the usability and the understandability of the important work that provides the basis for these weekly reports.

Comment: Many of the tables and charts in the weekly report are out of date. They represent important factors but no new data has been available to update them for quite some time.

Wishlist 2. It would be helpful if outdated tables and charts were either placed in an appendix, or if the chart could be updated to show the current end date and the missing data. Otherwise it is easy to misread the right hand side of the charts to think that the data and the trends represent the past few weeks or months instead of sometime in June 2006, or May 2005.

Comment: The chart formating for just about every chart is different and each chart seems to have its own unique starting and ending time intervals.

Wishlist 3. A move to more consistent chart formats and time intervals would greatly enhance the readability and usability of these reports.

BLS Compensation Report

The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report on wages and benefits includes these relatively easy to read charts that highlight the employment compensation trends over the past 6+ years. The moderately long time frame makes it easy to detect patterns and compare recent behavior to the situation at the turn of the century.



With the second chart, using the non seasonably adjusted numbers for the percent change over 12 months makes a lot of sense.

The red lines in the 2nd and 3rd charts plot the same metric. The blue line converts those wage gains to constant dollars and makes pretty clear how little this has changed over the past 6 years.

It would have been nice to see the total compensation chart including wages and benefits adjusted to constant dollars.