Discussion in economics analytic

You need to provide correct answers with accurate explanations to earn full points.

1- Go to https://fivethirtyeight.com/ or https://www.nytimes.com/section/upshot and find an article that uses data to tell its story or make its point. Include the URL of that article in your reply.
2- Pick one of the statistics or graphs in the article. Copy/paste that into your assignment (many of their graphs are interactive and so can’t be copy/pasted, but you can take a screenshot instead and paste that in, that works).
3- In the text of the article, what point is it supporting with that data, or what story is it trying to tell with that data? In other words, how is this data being interpreted? For example, a story might have a graph showing that the inflation-adjusted student loan burden is going up over time, and the article might say, “rising tuition costs are putting more debt onto students’ shoulders.” The story uses the fact that the loan burden is going up over time to support the story that it’s because of rising tuition costs.
4- What is an alternate story you could tell with that data? There’s always some alternate explanation, even if it’s ridiculous. Ridiculous explanations are okay for this question.
For example, “parents are saving less than they used to, pushing more of the costs of college onto their children” is one reasonable way to explain the rising loan burden that has nothing to do with rising tuition costs.
“Students are taking on more loans because loans are a cool new fad and everyone wants as much debt as possible” is another way to explain the rising loan burden that has nothing to do with rising tuition costs, but it’s ridiculous.
Either answer would be fine for this question.
5- Given what you know about the real world, what do you think makes more sense – their explanation of the data or yours? Why?

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