Names of team members that participated in this review: Betsy Priem, Janice Im, Troy Zhu
Describe the goal of the project.
The goal of this project is to create a website that provides easy interpretability of the true scale of global wealth and income inequality.
Describe the data used or collected, if any. If the proposal does not include the use of a specific dataset, comment on whether the project would be strengthened by the inclusion of a dataset.
The Forbes Billionaire's List. This data provides the team with details about billionaires, including a wealth variable and location (specific state if billionaire is from the US).
Wealth Mobility Dataset. This data breaks down wealth by quintiles and has a binary race category (Black or white). The geographic location is unknown, as is the year of wealth estimates.
Describe the approaches, tools, and methods that will be used.
The team will create animations and interactive dashboards to visualize 1) how wealthy each billionaire is compare to others (unclear who the others are just yet), 2) the industries of the billionaires in bar plots, 3) state-level distributions of where billionaires were born in the US (via a chloropleth), and 4) economic mobility patterns with a drop-down interactive element.
Is there anything that is unclear from the proposal?
Is the Wealth Mobility Dataset from the US only? What year is the data from? Since these are relative to each other (put into quintiles) you might want to really clarify in your visualizations that these are measures of wealth mobility in X location ONLY (not global, unless in fact it really is a global relative estimate of mobility).
The Forbes dataset is listed as annual, so I assume it is from 2021. You might want to clarify this. Knowing the years of the wealth measures will help the reader understand how comparable these measures of wealth are.
In your visualization plan, you mention you are comparing wealth inequality to the average-income person based on GDP produced per capita. Is this a separate dataset you are incorporating or where are these values coming from? Also, from a theoretical standpoint, income and wealth are actually two separate measures and it's difficult to compare the two in a meaningful way.
Provide constructive feedback on how the team might be able to improve their project.
The interactive pieces are really excellent and achieve your goals of understanding the scale of wealth inequality. What could be improved is the way you connect your visualizations to your original questions. For example, the question "Does anybody really need so much wealth?" cannot be answered with your data and in visual format. It's also unclear with the "What can the wealth of a billionaire accomplish?" question how a visualization would answer this. One idea might be to find a measure of debt or cost of social welfare program and how many households it sustains and create a visualization of that. E.g., Bezos could take 1% of his wealth and pay for the entire budget of SNAP benefits, or something like that.
It's a bit unclear what the interactive dashboard for economic mobility will convey. Maybe if you link that more clearly to a research question or some type of framing it will be easier for the reader to take away your key point from choosing different quintiles for mobility.
What aspect of this project are you most interested in and would like to see highlighted in the presentation.
The most promising elements are the comparative elements to offer scale (e.g., how many households - visualized with a grain of rice - it would take to reach each billionaire's wealth profile). Finding a way to map this information onto existing schemas (we all understand the scale of a grain of rice) and do this in a clear visualization will be a great challenge and accomplishment!
Provide constructive feedback on any issues with file and/or code organization.
The Repo organization seems like it might not yet be finished. Will there also be a folder for the presentation - or will the presentation be a walk-through of the website you create from your analysis?
(Optional) Any further comments or feedback?
Very ambitious project with important social implications - looking forward to how it all turns out!
Peer review by: Curly Locust
Names of team members that participated in this review: Betsy Priem, Janice Im, Troy Zhu
Describe the goal of the project.
The goal of this project is to create a website that provides easy interpretability of the true scale of global wealth and income inequality.
The team will create animations and interactive dashboards to visualize 1) how wealthy each billionaire is compare to others (unclear who the others are just yet), 2) the industries of the billionaires in bar plots, 3) state-level distributions of where billionaires were born in the US (via a chloropleth), and 4) economic mobility patterns with a drop-down interactive element.
The interactive pieces are really excellent and achieve your goals of understanding the scale of wealth inequality. What could be improved is the way you connect your visualizations to your original questions. For example, the question "Does anybody really need so much wealth?" cannot be answered with your data and in visual format. It's also unclear with the "What can the wealth of a billionaire accomplish?" question how a visualization would answer this. One idea might be to find a measure of debt or cost of social welfare program and how many households it sustains and create a visualization of that. E.g., Bezos could take 1% of his wealth and pay for the entire budget of SNAP benefits, or something like that.
It's a bit unclear what the interactive dashboard for economic mobility will convey. Maybe if you link that more clearly to a research question or some type of framing it will be easier for the reader to take away your key point from choosing different quintiles for mobility.
The most promising elements are the comparative elements to offer scale (e.g., how many households - visualized with a grain of rice - it would take to reach each billionaire's wealth profile). Finding a way to map this information onto existing schemas (we all understand the scale of a grain of rice) and do this in a clear visualization will be a great challenge and accomplishment!
The Repo organization seems like it might not yet be finished. Will there also be a folder for the presentation - or will the presentation be a walk-through of the website you create from your analysis?