Time has its "Person of the Year." Amazon has its books of the year. Pretty Much Amazing has its mixtapes of the year. Buzzfeed has its insane-stories-from-Florida of the year. And Wonkblog, of course, has its graphs of the year. For 2013, we asked some of the year's most interesting, important and influential thinkers to name their favorite graph of the year — and why they chose it. Here are Robert Rubin's.
The first, which is a chart, not a graph, in my view, is deeply troubling with respect to the future of our society and the future of our democracy. How can any society or any government succeed when most of its institutions are held in such low regard by its citizens?
The Hamilton Project graph makes the point that a surprising portion of those in poverty or in the lower middle class, have had at least some post-high school education.
- Robert Rubin was Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton and is currently co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.
See all the graphs of 2013 here, including entries from Bill Gates, Jonathan Franzen, Patty Murray, Tyler Cowen, Bill McKibben, Emily Oster, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Greene, Chuck Schumer, Chris Hayes, and Ron Wyden.