Blogging

Three copies of the same chart landed in my inbox in a single week. A rising line for federal debt held by the public, denominated in trillions of dollars. A falling line for manufacturing employment, denominated in millions of workers.…

Once a month, on the last Tuesday, The Conference Board asks roughly 3,200 American households five questions about the economy. The answers get converted into a diffusion-style index with 1985 set to 100, published at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, and within…

The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), published monthly by The Conference Board, records how a rotating sample of a few thousand U.S. households describe current business and job conditions and what they expect six months ahead. Its two published components, the…

November 5, 2024. Millions of us sat through the same ritual: county-level returns filling in across a national choropleth map, color bleeding across state lines in real time. The visual metaphor was doing a lot of heavy lifting. It implied…

The Consumer Confidence Index, or CCI, comes out every month from The Conference Board. It is one of the most quoted U.S. economic indicators. It is also one of the most consistently misread. The index is a sentiment measure: a…

The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI) is a monthly survey-based measure of how U.S. households assess current business and labor market conditions and their expectations for the next six months. It sits alongside the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment,…

The Consumer Confidence Index, or CCI, comes out every month from The Conference Board. It gets quoted constantly in U.S. policy reporting. It also gets misread constantly. The index is a sentiment measure. It captures what surveyed households say they…

Demographic change is the measurable shift in a population’s size, age structure, geographic distribution, or composition over a defined period. It sits at the intersection of economic policy, public opinion, and civic data because nearly every long-term policy question—pension solvency,…

January 2022. A major news outlet pushes a stacked area chart of cumulative U.S. COVID-19 cases to its front page. The visual reads as catastrophe—a near-vertical wall climbing toward 80 million. Engagement spikes. The chart is actively misleading readers about…

Why Demographic Data Demands Restraint Demographic change is a slow, cumulative process. Birth rates shift over decades. Migration patterns rebalance across census cycles. Yet the charts we encounter in news reports and policy briefs often compress these gradual trends into…