Visual Capitalist's Niccolo Conte has created a new data visualization ranking nations according to their debt-to-GDP ratios. However, instead of only looking at their government debt as many others analysts have done, he's also broken out rankings for household and non-financial corporate debts as well for 43 of the world's biggest national economies.

Here's his summary of the top ranked nation for each category:

Debt can sit on very different parts of an economy’s balance sheet. In Japan, the largest burden sits with the government. In Switzerland, households stand out. And in Luxembourg, corporate borrowing towers over the size of the economy.

Here's the chart:

Conte describes what he found in creating the rankings:

Government debt is concentrated in Southern Europe and East Asia, with Greece (146.5%), Italy (137.1%), France (116.0%), Spain (100.7%), and Portugal (89.7%) all in the top 15 alongside Japan and Singapore (166.2%)....

Household debt is concentrated among wealthy economies with expensive housing and deep mortgage markets, led by Switzerland, Australia (114.0%), Canada (100.6%), the Netherlands (93.8%), and New Zealand (91.1%).

Corporate debt is especially high in Northern Europe and economies that host multinational financing structures. Luxembourg, Hong Kong, and Singapore (127.2%) all rank among the leaders.

Only three economies rank in the top 10 of more than one column: Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Canada’s government (100.2%), households (100.6%), and companies (118.3%) each owe roughly a year of GDP, which is why the country ranks sixth on combined debt without leading any single category.

Conte finds unique conditions apply for both Singapore and Switzerland, which are near or are at the top of the government and household debt-to-GDP categories:

Singapore’s second-place government figure is not what it looks like. By law, the proceeds of Singapore Government Securities cannot be spent on the budget. Most are issued to the national pension fund and invested, leaving the state with more assets than debt and a AAA credit rating....

Switzerland’s position at the top of the household ranking is particularly notable because the country has one of Europe’s lowest homeownership rates.

For decades, Swiss tax law taxed homeowners on the imputed rental value of their homes while allowing them to deduct mortgage interest, which rewarded keeping a mortgage rather than paying it down. Voters abolished that system in September 2025, with the change taking effect no earlier than 2028.

How many other countries have similarly strange and perverse incentives for their households and corporations to rack up debt?

Reference

Nicholas Conte. Ranked: Countries With the Highest Debt-to-GDP Ratios. [Online article, Infographic]. Visual Capitalist. 8 September 2026.

How much has the price per square foot of the typical new home sold in the U.S. changed over the last 10 years?

The following chart visualizes the answer to that question for each month from July 2016 through July 2026, both adjusted for inflation and in nominal, noninflation adjusted terms.

Perhaps the most surprising takeaway observation from the chart is that the median sale price per square foot of $213.91 for a new home sold in July 2026 is just nine cents per square foot more than it was in July 2016 after adjusting for inflation to be in terms of constant July 2026 U.S. dollars.

Not adjusting for inflation, the median new home cost per square foot in July 2026 is about 39% higher than it was ten years earlier.

The inflation adjusted peak median new home price per square foot came in April 2022, shortly before the U.S. Federal Reserve finally got around to hiking U.S. interest rates to combat the high inflation unleashed by the Biden Administration. Adjusting for inflation, that peak was $279.90 per square foot. The nominal peak was $245.49 per square foot in October 2022.

References

Federal Reserve Economic Data. Housing Inventory: Median Home Size in Square Feet in the United States, July 2016-August 2026. [Online Database]. 4 September 2026.

Federal Reserve Economic Data. Median Sales Price of New Houses Sold for the United States. [Online Database]. 25 August 2026.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: All Items in U.S. City Average. [Online Database]. 11 September 2026.

Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen and Miranda Smith have taken on the challenge of showing how the GDP of individual states in the U.S. compares with entire countries. That's a unique challenge because U.S. economic output is much larger than all other nations. Here's how Cohen describes it's relative size:

Overall, the U.S. has a $30.8 trillion national GDP, roughly equal to the combined output of China, Germany, and Japan, the world’s next three largest economies.

Matching national GDPs to state-level GDPs within the U.S. is also challenging because there's not a one nation-to-one state match. In their visualization, Cohen and Smith work around that by identifying the nearest national GDP that comes closest to a state's GDP. As a result, some nations show up more than once.

The following infographic presents their results using available GDP data for 2025, following an abstract version of how the U.S. is often presented on elementary school wall maps:

Cohen singles out the four biggest state economies for more discussion:

At $4.3 trillion, California would rank among the world’s five largest economies if it were an independent country. Its closest match on the map is the United Kingdom.

Texas, meanwhile, has a $2.9 trillion economy, putting it closest to Russia. Both are major energy powerhouses, particularly in oil and gas.

New York’s $2.5 trillion economy is roughly the same size as Canada’s GDP. Meanwhile, Florida’s $1.8 trillion economy is closest to Australia, the largest economy in Oceania.

Together, these four states would each qualify for the Group of 20 (G20) if they were independent countries.

There is another way to put the relative size of the U.S. economy into perspective with this visualization: counting up the nations they reference to approximate the total gross domestic product of the United States in 2025. Here's what we came up with in doing that count:

• (5) Taiwans
• (2) Belgiums
• (2) Finlands
• (2) Ukraines
• (1) Austria
• (1) Algeria
• (1) Australia
• (1) Bahrain
• (1) Canada
• (1) Costa Rica
• (1) Czechia
• (1) Denmark
• (1) Dominican Republic
• (1) Ethiopia
• (1) Ghana
• (1) Greece
• (1) Hungary
• (1) Iran
• (1) Kazakhstan
• (1) Kenya
• (1) Kuwait
• (1) Malaysia
• (1) Myanmar
• (1) Morocco
• (1) Norway
• (1) New Zealand
• (1) Peru
• (1) Poland
• (1) Portugal
• (1) Russia
• (1) United Arab Emirates
• (1) United Kingdom
• (1) Uruguay
• (1) Saudi Arabia
• (1) Singapore
• (1) Slovakia
• (1) Slovenia
• (1) Switzerland
• (1) Thailand
• (1) Turkmenistan
• (1) Vietnam
• (1) Zimbabwe

Reference

Gabriel Cohen and Miranda Smith. Mapped: Every U.S. States' Economy, Matched to a Country. Visual Capitalist. [Online Article and Image]. 16 August 2026.

We first wrote about Hauser's Law in 2009. At the time, we described it as "one of the stranger phenomenons in economic data". The law itself was proposed by W. Kurt Hauser in 1993, who observed:

No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.

In 2009, we found total tax collections the U.S. government averaged 17.8% of GDP in the years from 1946 through 2008, with a standard deviation of 1.2% of GDP. Six years later, we revisited it once again and found that while the standard deviation was the same, average total tax collections from 1946 through 2018 was lowered to 16.8% of GDP because of 2013's comprehensive revision of GDP that significantly boosted historic GDP estimates after the basic GDP formula was redefined.

Seven years later, we're revisiting the historic data once again to see if it still holds. Spoiler alert: it does!

Here's a triple-set of charts to show off Hauser's Law in action!

Since we're now spanning 80 years worth of data, during which the U.S.' maximum income tax rate has ranged between 28% and 92% of income, we confirm once again that the U.S. government's total tax collections have averaged 16.8% with a standard deviation of 1.2% of GDP from 1946 through 2025. If you know your normal distribution bell curve from statistics, that means over 99% of the U.S. government's total tax collections from 1946 through 2026 would be expected to fall between 13.2% and 20.4% of GDP, which they have.

The pattern also holds true for U.S. personal income tax collections, although here, the average is 7.7% of GDP and the standard deviation is 0.8% of GDP.

What all these numbers mean is that the U.S. government's tax collections have been remarkably stable as a percent of GDP, or the national income, over the last eight decades, regardless of how the top income tax rate has been set. We think that represents a political equilibrium, especially as higher rates of tax collections have not been able to be sustained.

There are just four periods where tax collections rose more than one standard deviation above the mean level, none of which proved to be sustainable.

1. In 1968, the Democratic U.S. Congress and President Lyndon Johnson passed a shock 10% income surtax that took effect in mid-year, spiking the top tax rate from 70% to 77% and increasing the amount collected from top income tax earners by an additional 10%. Coupled with a spike in inflation, for which personal income taxes were not adjusted to compensate, this tax hike led to outsize income tax collections in that year.
2. The sustained high inflation of 1978 (7.62%), 1979 (11.22%), 1980 (13.58%) and 1981 (10.35%) led to higher tax collections through bracket creep, as income tax brackets in the U.S. were not adjusted for inflation until 1985 as part of President Ronald Reagan's first term Economic Recovery Tax Act.
3. Beginning in April 1997, a cut in the capital gains tax rate caused the Dot Com Stock Market Bubble to being inflating. As it expanded, the bubble minted a large number of new millionaires as investors swarmed to participate in Internet and "tech" company initial public offerings or private capital ventures, which in turn, inflated personal income tax collections. Unfortunately, like the vaporware produced by many of the companies that sprang up to exploit the investor buying frenzy, the illusion of prosperity could not be sustained and tax collections crashed with the incomes of the Internet titans in the bursting of the bubble, leading to the recession that followed. It eventually came to an end in 2003 after the capital gains tax rate was increased to be equal to the dividend tax rate once again.
4. In 2022, tax collections spiked with the recovery from the coronavirus pandemic after government-mandated lockdowns and restrictions on businesses were lifted.

There's one final piece of the puzzle we haven't tackled, and that's why the U.S. national debt has grown so large even as federal tax collections have been so relatively stable. Here we find three factors that have contributed to its growth:

1. The launch of Medicare in 1965 coincides with a period in which government spending no longer drops below the long-term average of tax collections. Before Medicare was passed into law, government spending only surged above that level when wars were fought, dropping back to pre-war levels after they ended. World War 2 is a classic example, with its drawdown in spending taking place in the years after it ended in 1945. The 1980s Cold War defense buildup also shows the same pattern, with spending returning to pre-buildup levels as a percent of GDP in the 1990s as a peace dividend.
2. The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 led to massive bailouts by the U.S. government. Even though that crisis ended, spending failed to return to its pre-crisis level because President Obama's Affordable Care Act permanently inflated the government's spending from 2014 onward.
3. The Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020 led to massive government subsidies to offset the impact of the extreme economic disruption caused by state and local government lockdowns. However, two Biden administration initiatives combined to permanently inflate government spending above their pre-crisis levels: the American Recovery Act with its inflationary impact and the cynically-named Inflation Reduction Act that further boosted spending. These two initiatives kept government spending elevated at levels far above what the U.S. government can reasonably expect to collect in taxes based on the last 80 years of experience.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the U.S. government has gone from running mostly balanced budgets in the years before 1965 to running consistently in the red in the years since with few exceptions. The upward ratcheting of government spending in the years since 1965, and particularly since 2008 to levels far above what the U.S. government is capable of sustaining through its stable tax collections is why the national debt has grown to exceed $40 trillion.

Previously on Political Calculations

• Hauser's Law (2009)
• Is Hauser's Law Still Valid? (2011)
• Hauser's Law, Updated for 2019
• Hauser's Law in Action: 1946-2025

Two months ago, the S&P 500 (Index: SPX) was rising so quickly it raised the prospect the index could see a break down in the relative period of order the index established since the end of 2023.

Instead, after peaking on 2 June 2026, the S&P 500 has reverted toward its established mean trajectory. Through the end of July 2026, the index is hovering right around that 31-month-old central trend curve.

Which is to say the index remains well within its established relative period of order after having regressed toward its mean trend trajectory. Whatever bubble might have been forming within the index has mostly deflated.

The following chart visualizes the relationship between the value of the S&P 500 and its underlying trailing year dividends per share from 29 December 2023 through 31 July 2026:

Previously on Political Calculations

• How Big is the AI Bubble and Is It Really a Bubble?
• The Definition of a Bubble
• The Ultimate Sell Signal
• What Caused the Dot Com Bubble to Begin and What Caused It to End?
• The Black Monday Stock Market Crash Explained
• Not Necessarily Wrong But Useful

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull and bear looking at a balloon labeled 'AI BUBBLE?' that has deflated".

There are thirty stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Index: DJI), the U.S. stock market's oldest running index. Unlike the S&P 500 (Index: SPX), the market capitalization-weighted index that's overtaken it as standard for measuring the performance of the U.S. stock market, the component stocks of the DJI are weighted according to their price.

For example, the stock of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) has the heaviest weight within the index, accounting for 11.72% of its value on 27 July 2026 thanks to its highest-in-the-index share price of $1,041.82.

With a share price of $837.24, Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT) ranks second, making up 9.42% of the index. The third largest component stock of the DJI belongs to United Health (NYSE: UNH), whose share price of $427.54 gives it a 4.8% share of the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The following chart visualizes the relative share of each of the DJI's 30 component stocks within the index:

We wondered how this chart would change if the thirty Dow Jones Industrial component stocks were weighted within the index according to their market capitalization. The next chart shows the results of that exercise, keeping the order and coloring of the component stock shares the same as the price-weighted visualization:

The DJI's top three components of Goldman Sachs, Caterpillar, and United Health go from accounting for a combined 25.94% of the index to just 4.23%. In their place, the top three component stocks of become Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), which would account for 49.7% of the entire DJI's valuation.

References

Slickcharts. Dow Jones Industrial Average: Price Weighting of Component Stocks and Market Capitalization. 27 July 2026.

Keeping your digital accounts secure is a never ending arms race.

Computing technology increases in capability every year. For hackers with access to the latest, greatest computers and code, it is easier than ever for them to run through tens of millions of combinations of characters to discover your passwords.

What you thought might be a safe and secure password a few years ago may now be vulnerable to being cracked. And if your password can be easily cracked, how safe are your accounts?

Hive Systems has updated their "Time It Takes a Hacker to Brute Force Your Password" infographic for 2026. Here is the table showing how long a competent hacker would take to find passwords made up of various lengths and combinations of characters:

How easy it is for a hacker to crack your password depends upon how long it is and what combinations of numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters, and special characters you use in your password. As you can see in the chart, in 2026, if you're using eight digit numbers as your password, you might as well not even bother having one....

The Global Carbon Budget offers a wealth of data on carbon dioxide emissions. That includes estimates of how CO₂ each nation has emitted into the Earth's atmosphere in each year since 1850. The latest edition of the report covers emissions from that year through 2024.

But that's not the whole story for atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. When carbon dioxide is emitted into the air, it enters into the planet's carbon cycle, which extracts a portion of the emitted carbon dioxide from the air. These natural processes then play out slowly over decades, centuries, and millennia.

It's possible to estimate how much of a given year's emissions still remain in the Earth's air.

The following chart reveals both the total historic emissions of carbon dioxide and the portion of those emissions that is still present in the air from the modern day territories of the United Kingdom, India, the European Union, China, the United States, and the combined rest of the world for emissions produced in the years from 1850 through 2024.

Here are the percentages to indicate the portion of each territory's total historic emissions from 1850 through 2024 that remain in the Earth's atmosphere:

• United Kingdom: 49.3%
• India: 78.6%
• European Union: 55.7%
• China: 78.5%
• United States: 57.8%
• Rest of the World: 66.4%

The following treemap chart visualizes each territory's share of the amount of excess carbon dioxide (defined as that coming from fossil fuel combustion in the years from 1850 through 2024) that is still in the air today:

In the three years from 2021 to 2024, China's share has risen from 17.3% to 18.5%, while the United States' share has declined from 22.3% to 21.4%. With those opposing trends, we project China's emissions that remain in the air will surpass those of the United States in 2031, the timing of which is unchanged from what we projected three years ago.

References

Friedlingstein et al. Global Carbon Budget 2025, Earth System Science Data, 13 May 2026. DOI: 10.5194/essd-18-3211-2026.

Political Calculations. How Long Does Carbon Dioxide Stay in the Atmosphere? [Online Article, Tool]. 19 July 2023.

Political Calculations. How Much Fossil Fuel CO2 Is in the Air? [Online Article]. 15 August 2023.

Political Calculations. Who Made the Excess Carbon Dioxide in Today's Air?. [Online Article]. 29 September 2023.

Image credit: Carbon Cycle by NASA on Wikimedia Commons Public Domain CC0 1.0 Universal Deed.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Home Ownership Affordability Monitor, the national median household income was $85,828 in March 2026. This figure compares with Motio Research's estimate of $88,310 and our estimate of $87,164 for that month.

But when you drill down into smaller regions within the U.S., such as the metropolitan areas surrounding the nation's largest cities, the median household income for each can vary quite a lot from the figure that applies for the national population. Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, Niccolo Conte, and Miranda Smith dug into the median household income data for the fifty largest metropolitan areas to create the following infographic:

By definition, median household income is the amount of total money income earned by a household that falls in the exact middle of a given population's income spectrum. Half of the households within that population will have a higher income, half will have a lower income.

With that definition in mind, the three metropolitan areas with the highest median household incomes are:

• San Jose, California: $175,491
• San Francisco, California: $141,277
• Washington, DC: $130,587

The three major metropolitan areas with the lowest median household incomes are:

• Buffalo, New York: $74,258
• Memphis, Tennessee: $70,056
• New Orleans, Louisiana: $65,021

San Jose is the only major metropolitan area of the U.S. with a median household income that is double the U.S. national median household income.

If you're a World Cup fan reading this article from outside the U.S. and wonder how your nation's median household income compares to those in the U.S., you might try using this tool or others similar to it to convert the U.S. median household incomes by city into your national currency after adjusting for their relative purchasing power. For example, the gross "equivalised" median household income in the United Kingdom in 2023/24 for all households was £44,300 (see Table 20a in this spreadsheet from the UK's Office of National Statistics), which would convert to about $61,357 in U.S. dollars in 2026 and puts the UK's median household income below that of New Orleans.

Image credit: Mapped: How Household Income Varies Across Major U.S. Metros by Gabriel Cohen, Niccolo Conte, and Miranda Smith. Visual Capitalist. 10 June 2026.

Which states are the most and least affordable places for American families to live after paying taxes and their essential expenses?

The Common Sense Institute tallied up the numbers and ranked each state after subtracting federal and state taxes and also essential expenses like housing, utilities, groceries, auto and health insurance, fuel, and childcare in each state from the paychecks for a family of four with two adult breadwinners who work full time and earn the state's median hourly income.

Visual Capitalist's Dorothy Neufield then revisualized the results to focus on how much that of the modeled families' income remained. Here's her version of the Common Sense Institute's map:

Here's her analysis of the most and least affordable states:

In top-ranked states like Iowa, households keep nearly 35% of their income, about $2,900 per month. In Hawaii, that figure drops to just 9%. That’s a difference of more than $2,000 per month in disposable income.

[...]

Midwestern states dominate the rankings, largely due to lower housing and childcare costs.

Iowa ranks first, with households keeping 34.7% of their income, followed by South Dakota (34.6%) and North Dakota (33.5%).

[...]

In the least affordable states, families spend up to 91% of their income on essentials and taxes, leaving little room for savings or unexpected expenses.

Hawaii families are most strained, with 9% of income left, followed by California at 10.9%. Between 2019 and 2025, California households saw one of the largest declines in affordability across states.

Massachusetts, despite high incomes, ranks near the bottom. Childcare alone consumes 24% of household income, showing how a single cost category can erode income advantages.

The Common Sense Instutute also looks at how each state's affordability has changed from 2019 to 2025. They find that Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah have seen their cost of living fall the most, while Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California have seen the biggest escalation in living expenses over these years.

References

Dorothy Neufield. Mapped: Where Americans Keep Most of Their Paycheck. Visual Capitalist. [Online article]. 27 April 2026.

In the United States, when people talk about mortgages, they almost invariably are talking about the 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage.

It wasn't always that way. In fact, it wasn't until the Housing Act of 1954 became law that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage became mainstream. The law's "combination of federal insurance and full amortization requirements made the extended timeline financially safe for banks". Soon after, the 30-year fixed rate conventional mortgage became the default for both lenders and home buyers.

But it wasn't until much later that federally-backed agencies like Freddie Mac began keeping regular track of what the average monthly interest rate was for homes bought in the U.S. with these mortgages. As important as they are for prospective American homeowners, the historical data for these mortgages only goes back to April 1971. Freddie Mac, officially known as Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, has maintained weekly data for mortgages extending back to that month. The government-sponsored enterprise also used to report monthly averages for mortgage rates from April 1971 forward, but discontinued the practice after December 2022.

And yet, because housing sales and prices are reported on a monthly basis, it's incredibly useful to have mortgage rates averaged over the period of a month. Since Freddie Mac isn't doing that job any more, we took it over and have made it publicly available.

It's built into the following interactive chart, which we've just updated to visualize 55 years worth of the average monthly interest rates for 30-year conventional mortgages in the U.S.

The average 30-year fixed-rate conventional mortgage was 6.33% in April 2026.

References

Freddie Mac. 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgages Since 1971. [Online Database]. Accessed 15 May 2026. Note: Starting from December 2022, the estimated monthly mortgage rate is taken as the average of weekly 30-year conventional mortgage rates recorded during the month.

Image credit: Mortgage Payment Due date by alanharder.ca via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).

From Our World In Data, here's an interactive chart showing how life expectancy for Americans who have reached the indicated age has changed from birth (for Americans born from 1880 through 2023) and for those who have reached the indicated age (from 1933 through 2023):

As of 2023, U.S. life expectancy for all age groups has more than fully recovered from 2020's Coronavirus Pandemic. Here is a static version of the chart that we created after creating an alternate interactive version of the chart using Datawrapper's data visualization tools.

Several weeks ago, we presented our visualization of the market capitalization of the S&P 500 and its ten biggest components at the end of the first quarter of 2026. Visual Capitalist offers an expanded view of all the companies of the U.S. stock market's benchmark index, grouping them in their industrial sectors:

Here is Dorothy Neufield's commentary about the information the image conveys:

This visualization brings all 500 companies into a single view, with each sized by its share of the index and grouped by sector. It is based on data from Slickcharts as of March 30, 2026.

Each circle represents a company, making it easy to compare how market value is distributed across sectors—and to see which firms dominate the index.

One immediate takeaway is how much space is occupied by just a handful of companies. Just 10 firms now make up over 36% of the S&P 500, up from 23% in 2000.

She offers this observation about what the concentration of market cap within such a small fraction of firms, mainly in the technology sector, represents:

... the market is behaving less like a 500-company index, and more like a concentrated bet on a few dominant firms. At the center of this shift is the AI boom, illustrating how a single technological wave is reshaping the market’s hierarchy.

Regardless of anyone's opinions of today's Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and its potential, it is having a profound effect on the U.S. stock market and how Americans invest.

Reference

Dorothy Neufield and Amy Kuo. Every S&P 500 Company in One Giant Chart. Visual Capitalist. [Online article]. 14 April 2026.

The United States initiated Operation Epic Fury against the Islamic Republic of Iran on Saturday, 28 February 2026. The S&P 500 (Index: SPX) had closed its trading week the day before, ending at a value of 6,878.88. Through the close of trading on 30 March 2026 the index has dropped 535.16 points, or about 7.8% of its pre-geopolitical event level.

As major events go in the U.S. stock market, at this point in time, the impact of the Iran war is a little smaller in magnitude than 2025's DeepSeek AI shock that sent the S&P 500 crashing between 19 February 2025 and 13 March 2025. The following chart shows both events, with the S&P 500 mapped against its underlying trailing year dividends per share.

The main difference between the two events is the apparent steepness of their declines. As shown in the chart, the DeepSeek AI shock appears to have involved a more severe dropoff, falling a similar amount in a shorter period of time, but we won't know for sure if that's the case until after SPGlobal finalizes the S&P 500's dividend data for 2026-Q1 after the close of trading on 31 March 2026. In the chart, the trailing year dividend data is based on a combination of historic outcomes and quarterly dividend futures that don't precisely match up with the S&P 500's calendar quarters.

In any case, the Iran war event looks set to become larger in magnitude than the DeepSeek AI shock. Will the S&P 500 continue declining so much that it overtakes the combination one-two punch of 2025's DeepSeek AI shock and the "Liberation Day" global tariff event? Or will it recover before it might drop that much?

The ranks of lower and middle class households in the United States is thinning. The reason why is remarkable: more households are earning higher incomes, allowing them to move up into the top ranks of the nation's income spectrum.

You don't have to take our word for it. We've organized the U.S. Census Bureau's inflation adjusted data for household income from 1967 through 2024 into three groups. The first group contains households with annual total money income of $49,999 or less, which represents lower income-earning households. The second group contains households earning between $50,000 and $149,999 to represent middle income-earning households. The third group contains all households earning $150,000 or more.

The following chart confirms the percentage share of lower and middle-class households in the U.S. is shrinking as the percentage of upper-class households increases.

U.S. households earning $150,000 or more in inflation-adjusted constant 2024 U.S. dollars have risen from 4.6% of all households to 26.1% from 1967 through 2024. Middle-ranked households earning between $50,000 and $149,999 has fallen from 52.4% to 43.8% of all U.S. households. The lowest-ranked households earning real incomes of $49,999 or less has plunged from accounting for 43.0% of all U.S. households to just 30.2%.

A similar pattern holds for U.S. families. See more commentary on this phenomenon here and here.

Reference

U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables: Households. Table H-17. Households by Total Money Income, Race, and Hispanic Origin of Householder. [Excel spreadsheet]. 25 August 2025.

The S&P 500 has sustained a mostly orderly, upward trend since the end of 2023.

That's a really strange thing to consider because the index nearly saw order within the market break down in early 2025. The first leg down toward chaos came with the unveiling of China's DeepSeek AI system on 19 February 2025 deflated whatever bubble had been forming among U.S. tech companies in response to the potential for artificial intelligence technologies. It took a month for the overall index to show signs of stabilization.

The DeepSeek shock was followed by President Trump's 2 April 2025 "Liberation Day" global tariff announcement, which sent the index stocks plunging by a similar amount. Had it lasted longer, the one-two punch of these two hugely negative shocks would have broken the state of relative order that had become well established going into mid-February 2025. But order didn't break down, as the shocks proved to just be short-lived outliers. The S&P 500 recovered from the shocks and has since continued to grow, which you can see in the following chart.

Through Friday, 6 February 2026, we find that period of order has real staying power, despite the stock market's day-to-day volatility.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a Wall Street bull looking at a chart showing a diagonal narrow channel running from the lower left to upper right that is labeled 'GOOD' with the upper left labeled 'TOO GOOD' and the lower right labeled 'HERE THERE BE DRAGONS'". We made some minor modifications to the chart.

The Consumer Expenditure Surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics play a major role in how inflation is measured in the United States. Data from these surveys is used to set the weights of different categories of these expenditures within the index, which in turn, affects how the BLS calculates the inflation American consumers experiencing through the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

But how are those weights changing over time? We recently featured charts showing the data for shares that the major categories of consumer expenditure have with respect to the average total expenditures of American household consumer units from 1984 through 2024, but those charts have a weakness. They present too many data series together, which makes it tough to track how individual categories are changing, especially when their data is close in value to that of other categories and the data series either cross-over each other or overlap.

We're experimenting with a different way to visually present that data. The following chart showing how the share of the major categories of consumer expenditures with respect to total average expendtures uses a clustered column format to group ten years worth of data for each major category. This format makes it easier to see how recent trends for each major category are developing, while also making it easy to compare how each category compares with others, which indicates how much weight it has in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index.

We've also organized the major categories of consumer expenditures in order from highest to lowest as you read the chart from left to right. For most of these data series, 2020 represents something of an anomaly because of that year's coronavirus pandemic. But when you look closer at these categories, especially the four largest ones, you'll find that each has claimed a rising share of total expenditures in the years since 2020. These are the categories in which inflating prices contributed to their rising share of consumer expenditures.

At the same time, other expenditures show falling trends over these years. What you're seeing are Americans reducing this other spending in response to the rising cost of the "Big 4" consumer expenditure categories.

For policymakers, this chart indicates that focusing on reducing costs in those "Big 4" categories to make them more affordable will do the most to provide tangible benefits for American consumers.

Speaking of which, health care, in the middle of the chart, is an interesting and deceptive anomaly. It shows health care expenditures as a share of average total expenditures, which are dominated by health insurance, rising through 2020, then falling in the years since. That's not because health insurance has become less costly since 2020, it's because the U.S. government increased health insurance subsidies so much it offset the big increases in the cost of health insurance that has been taking place. Since these subsidies are not truly sustainable, it would be greatly beneficial for policymakers to focus instead on directly reducing the cost of health insurance itself.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Expenditure Survey. Multiyear Tables. [PDF Documents: 1984-1991, 1992-1999, 2000-2005, 2006-2012, 2013-2020. Excel spreadsheet: 2021-2024]. Reference URL: https://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm. 19 December 2025. 

What were the biggest empires in world history? How long did they last? How much land was under their control?

Now, answer each of those questions and present the results on a single infographic....

That was one of the challenges the Michigan Geographic Alliance has taken on and in 2010, they produced a remarkable visualization to present the ebb and flow of empires over the millenias of human history. Here's the result of their work as featured at Visual Capitalist:

The Michigan Geographic Alliance has a Google Drive site where you can get a PDF versions of the World Geohistogram along with educational material to support lesson plans associated with it.

The visualization contains some surprising insights. For example, many will think of the Roman Empire as having been one of the largest in world history, which is true, but it didn't cover as much territory as Alexander the Great's short-lived Greek empire that preceded it.

The largest empires were those of European nations in the period from 1492 to the 1960s, but this is misleading because they were not under a single power. The British Empire was the world's largest ever, which at its peak, controlled about a quarter of the world's landmass, but it didn't control the 8.5% of the world's land that was controlled by France. Nor did it control territories under the sway of the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians, Germans, Russians, etc.

Meanwhile, the smallest and shortest-lived featured empire belong to the Hittites during the Bronze Age nearly two and a half-centuries ago, which aside from its interactions with other empires, has become overshadowed by them and their successors since its collapse.

Another Visualization

UsefulCharts' Matt Baker also built a chart tracking the rise and fall of empires through history, which is similar but different in significant ways. In the following video, he talks through what his version of much of the same information conveys.

Baker's presentation is more of a "subway map" style of presentation, which focuses on connecting events in time. While the Michigan Geographic Alliance's version shares that characteristic, it also provides visual cues to convey the scale of the empires it features, which we think gives it an edge in communicating vital information about the relative size of the empires it tracks through history.

Reference

Jeff Desjardins. The World’s Biggest Empires of History, on One Epic Visual Timeline. Visual Capitalist. [Online article]. 16 November 2025.

Colin Marshall. A Visual Timeline of World History: Watch the Rise & Fall of Civilizations Over 5,000 Years. OpenCulture. [Online article]. 18 December 2025.

Revelio Lab's non-government dependent jobs data for October 2025 reports the seasonally-adjusted total nonfarm employment level in the U.S. is 159,238,994. This figure represents a 9,057 net loss in jobs from September 2025.

The firm's detailed employment by sector data indicates the biggest contributor to the net loss in jobs was reduction in the number of government employees compared to the previous month. Overall, for the sixteen sectors tracked by Revelio Labs, nine were negative and seven were positive, with most showing relatively small changes in October 2025. Here are the five sectors that saw the biggest month-over-month changes:

• Government: 23,279,400 (-22,200)
• Retail Trade: 15,410,900 (-8,500)
• Manufacturing: 12,784,400 (-5,200)
• Financial Activities: 9,397,800 (+9,600)
• Education and Health Services: 26,929,800 (+22,000)

We've updated our pair of charts tracking Revelio Lab's seasonally-adjusted nonfarm employment data from January 2022 through October 2025, which we've compared against available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which hasn't reported any jobs data past August 2025 because of the continuing federal government shutdown.

The chart also reveals how Revelio Lab's data was revised over this period with its latest report. We observe the firm's estimates increased by a small amount over the entire period covered by our chart.

We've also indicated the BLS' total nonfarm employment estimates for the period, which are quite different in the period from January 2022 up to January 2025. The BLS' employment estimates have deteriorated in quality in recent years because the size of its sampling of U.S. employers plunged during the 2020's coronavirus pandemic and has not recovered, giving the BLS a much less complete picture of the nation's employment situation than it had before.

With enough Democratic party senators voting to break their party's filibuster against a Republican bill that would fund the U.S. government's operations, an end to the shutdown now appears to be on track. However, we think it will likely be another month before the BLS' employment estimates for the months they missed reporting might become available. After they do become available, we'll do one last recap of the total nonfarm employment data before resuming our series on teen employment trends.

References

Revelio Labs. Total Nonfarm Employment National. [CSV Data]. 2 November 2025.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total Nonfarm Employment. Current Employment Statistics - CES. [Online database]. Last Updated 5 September 2025.

Image credit: Woman Filling Out a Job Application by amtec_photos on Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC by-SA 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Deed.

How much income does the household in the exact middle of the income distribution in your state earn in a year?

Visual Capitalist's Niccolo Conte and Joyce Ma tapped the results of the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2024 to find out. They produced the following map to visualize what they found within the United States:

Conte summarizes where the highest and lowest incomes earned by the typical household in each state within the United States are to be found:

High-Earning States Concentrated on the Coasts

The states with the highest household earnings are heavily concentrated along the coasts, with Colorado being the highest-earning landlocked state at ninth on the list with $97,113. Utah is the next non-coastal state with a high level of household earnings at $96,658, ranking 10th overall.

The eight coastal states ahead of Colorado and Utah all had a median household income of at least $99,000, all at least 20% above the national median household income.

These coastal states benefit from robust technology, professional services, and government sectors that tend to offer higher-paying jobs, while also often having higher costs of living.

Southern States Lag Behind the National Median Income

States in the South continue to have many of the lowest household incomes in the U.S., often trailing significantly behind the national median of $81,604.

After Mississippi at $59,127, the next two lowest-earning states were West Virginia ($60,798) and Louisiana ($60,986).

Other states below $65,000 (20% below the national median) were Arkansas and Kentucky with $62,106 and $64,526 in median household income respectively.

While these figures are significantly below the national median, they do coincide with lower housing and living costs, providing a more balanced standard of living.

While not a state, Washington D.C. holds the top position, with a household at the 50th percentile in the nation's capitol collecting an annual income of $110,000. At the other extreme, a household in Mississippi, the lowest ranking state for median household income in 2024, earns $51,000 a year less.

References

Niccolo Conta and Joyce Ma. MiscMapped: Median Household Income by U.S. State. Visual Capitalist. [Online article]. 15 October 2025.