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Roller coaster of housing prices
Another financial-crisis item well worth your time. Below is a short video that I meant to play a year and a half ago, at Gel 2007, but ran out of time (there's a story there, ask me sometime).
This video shows US home prices over several decades as a roller coaster ride. Make sure to watch until the end. Watching this in early '07, it was beyond obvious to me that there was a problem that would inevitably be corrected. (Sadly, none of the "experts" at the banks seemed to catch on, basing their Ponzi scheme on the incredible notion that housing prices would never, could never, go down.)
Apart from the very important data, the presentation is worth a comment here: it's rare to see data played back for the viewer, in first-person perspective. This is a great use of an inexpensive tool to communicate the message in the data that much more effectively.
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Crashing Back To Earth
A Work in Progress — Sep 29, '08 – 6:19 PM
Via Mark Hurst, a very good way to understand how the prices of American homes have changed over the last century.......
Interesting. Amazing. And a well, duh. It is a good reminder that we should look at patterns, big ones and small ones, long term and short term. Change our perspective. Also brings me back to one of my favorite quotes from the National Archives building in DC: What is Past is Prologue. We are fools for not heeding that wisdom.
Personally, especially since we know all this already, I saw no added value in the roller coaster video; at the end I felt annoyed at having wasted almost four minutes watching it. A line graph shows the data in a way that's more striking visually.
Feels a bit too abstract.
Perhaps with the years always being visible and a few headlines added for a bit of context it would have made more sense to me.
But kudos for experimentation.
Yeah, a tiny bit more context would've definitely improved the video. But I will say that the bit towards the end of up, up, up was VISCERALLY unnerving. (I took a similar chart & mapped onto it when 3 generations of my family bought houses. I think we were all pretty lucky!)