Data visulations on the millenial generation
In the summer of 2017, I did some work for a reasearch project funded by Imperial College Business School. The project is named ‘Assessing the generational contract’. A section of around 10 pages on the Business school website are dedicated to the project
“The project will produce a comprehensive set of accounts for both the UK and US that measures all economic resources available to each generation, how those resources are used and how this has changed over the last 40-50 years.”
Aside from also developing the offical pages, my role in this project was also to produce a number of data visualisations documenting the findings of the researchers.
The first, shown below, is an interactive and animated population tree, illustrating the aeging population. It gives historical figures from 1960 - 2014, and projected figures for both males and females of different age groups over 100 years from 2014 - 2060, using fixed fertility and immigration rates for the projections. The bars to the right show the old-age dependency ratio for three different state retirement ages (SRA) - 65, 67, and 69. The old-age dependency ratio indicates whate percentage of the population is dependent on those between age 20 to the SRA. For example, for the current SRA of 65, if the old-age dependency ratio is 70%,then 70% of the population are financially dependent on those between 20-65. This graphic illustrates how increasing the SRA by only 4 years would significanlty reduce this old age dependency ratio.
The next visulation show the average amount and distribution of remaining lifetime monetary resources and expenses for each age group. There are two donut charts, the left is for resources, and the right is for expenses. For example, the average new born (0-9 year olds) expects to receive £675k in wages (human capital), £258k in welfare, state education and health benefits, £168k in private transfers (such as pocket money or general living expenses from parents), £61k in bequests (e.g inheritance) over their remaining lifetime, but at this age have no current financial assets. They will spend these resources over their lifetime; £677k on private consumption, £166k on public consumption such as on education and health, £216k on taxes, £107k on their children. The slider has ticks which allows the user to select any age group spanning 10 years from newborns to 100 years. For example, when the user slides to tha age group 20-30, the donut charts will display data for that age group. All values are calculated as present values with an interest rate of 5%.
I wrote these using the D3 data visulasation library for javascript, and have posted the source code on my github page. .