Project ideas

[MicahRCM]

Hello @jinfei1125

It looks like it is going to be just the two of us on this project. I think we can still reproduce an excellent project of the same caliber as our peers. I have been thinking about potential project ideas and I have a couple of ideas I would like to propose.

Idea 1: Wealth Visualizations on a Shiny App. At its core, it would be a website that visualizes wealth disparity in different ways. There are so many amazing ways that people do this.

1. Grains of rice represent Billionaire's net worth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw&ab_channel=NowThisNews
2. A game where a billionaire is getting killed by their money, literally. They are in a room quickly filling up with money from their income and as the player you have to spend it fast or die: https://switchbackstudio.itch.io/billionaires-dilemma
3. Wealth mobility by race: https://viz.theinequalitylab.com/Animations/1-mobility-rates.html

I think this is a fun topic because of the extremes. We have a lot of potential for cool visualizations and it's a pretty widely appealing topic.

Idea 2: Graphic animation package for network objects. There are some great network visualization packages like igraph and statnet, but in terms of time series changes there aren't really great packages, at least on CRAN, that show changes over time (or some other iterable variable like spatial data). This would probably be less fun and pretty heavy on the code, but it would probably be a good CV line.

Thoughts and feelings? By the way, my Signal is +15743446118

[jinfei1125]

Wow, Micah, thank you so much for these ideas!! I think the first idea would be great, although my friend just told me you are his TA in the Social Network Analysis. (I can feel you are more excited about the first one as well!) Let's do it and we can start writing the proposal after tomorrow's class? Do you want to have a brief talk after tomorrow's class? I can write more since you've taken lead on brainstorming these ideas.

Thanks for providing your Signal number. I will add you shortly!

[MicahRCM]

Hi Jinfei,

Sounds like you're good to go for #1 as well. Sounds great! I think it will be more fun anyway. May I ask who your friend is in SNA?

Unfortunately, I am (usually) unable to attend Thursday classes because of a standing conflict. A real shame because this is my favorite class I've taken at UC. If you would like to meet on Zoom some time after 2pm I am very happy to do so.

[jinfei1125]

Does 2:30 work for you? We can use this zoom link: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/4129906117?pwd=a2dnbEkrQVo4dFYycjFIcTVxSEVtdz09

[MicahRCM]

Sure, I'll see you at 2:30!

[jinfei1125]

Ben just said proposal is due next Wednesday. We still have enough time :)

[jinfei1125]

Available Data for three ideas:

1. Forbes annual report data:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JThOdF95e0NYoea5pCWd5UDXLmIGc1Fwj1aajDSYYhk/edit#gid=685599441
2. Difference Equation simulation? Here is an example of the famous SIR model with difference equation simulation in R: https://kinglab.eeb.lsa.umich.edu/480/nls/de.html
3. The wealth mobility by race Github: https://github.com/fpfeffer/wealthmobility

Note: I haven't edited README but I think we should cite the data source when we finish the writing part.

Shiny resources: https://app.datacamp.com/learn/skill-tracks/shiny-fundamentals-with-r

[jinfei1125]

Hi Moc, thanks for your proposal, I have a few questions about it.

For the wealth inequality, you asked "Does anybody really need so much wealth?", it is very hard to answer the question, do you have any idea on how we can answer and visualize it? I am thinking of using the consumer expenditures data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but they are too cheap compared to the billionaire level. Should we list price of luxury car, luxury bag, travel to Hawaii, travel to space, etc, like the killing billionaire game we played?

I am also curious about your plan on "Complete animated time series visualization". Do you want to draw the time series change of billionaire ranking or something else?

Thanks! The proposal and repo structure is finished.

[MicahRCM]

@jinfei1125 Great question Jinfei! You are right. Essentially, the question about people needing that much wealth is a non-starter in terms of there being any chance that the answer is anything but "no." It may be best combined with "What can the wealth of a billionaire accomplish?"

We can start with one or two reasonable yet expensive expenditures, such as a house rental in San Francisco and move onto more egregious expenditures such as private jets, and then finally we can move into the expenses that are actually beneficial to humanity. For example, paying for all of the chemotherapy in the world cots $9 billion a year, buying and forgiving all delinquent medical debt costs about 2 billion. Elon Musk is worth $219 billion...

Anyway, you brought up a great issue. I think we can answer the two questions together with one visualization.

Since we have the Billionaire's list (year over year) I think the one idea would be to show the total wealth of the top (500?) billionaires in comparison to the net population from the bottom percentile that matches their wealth. So year 2010 would show like 1.5 trillion dollars for top 500 billionaires and that's equivalent to the wealth of about 3 billion people from the bottom percentile. Next year, 2011, 1.7 trillion in wealth for top 500 and that's 3.1 billion people's wealth from the bottom, etc.

Just one idea and I'm open to something else!