A Day in the Life of Americans – This is how America runs by Nathan Yau.
You are accustomed to seeing complex graphs which are proclaimed to hold startling insights:
Nathan’s post starts off that way but you are quickly draw into one a visual presentation of daily activities of Americans as the clock runs from 4:00 AM.
Nathan has produced a number of stunning visualizations over the years but well, here’s his introduction:
From two angles so far, we’ve seen how Americans spend their days, but the views are wideout and limited in what you can see.
I can tell you that about 40 percent of people age 25 to 34 are working on an average day at three in the afternoon. I can tell you similar numbers for housework, leisure, travel, and other things. It’s an overview.
What I really want to see is closer to the individual and a more granular sense of how each person contributes to the patterns. I want to see how a person’s entire day plays out. (As someone who works from home, I’m always interested in what’s on the other side.)
So again I looked at microdata from the American Time Use Survey from 2014, which asked thousands of people what they did during a 24-hour period. I used the data to simulate a single day for 1,000 Americans representative of the population — to the minute.
More specifically, I tabulated transition probabilities for one activity to the other, such as from work to traveling, for every minute of the day. That provided 1,440 transition matrices, which let me model a day as a time-varying Markov chain. The simulations below come from this model, and it’s kind of mesmerizing.
Not only is it “mesmerizing,” its informative as well. To a degree.
Did you know that 74% of 1,000 average Americans are asleep when Jimmy Fallon comes on at 11:30 EST? 😉
What you find here and elsewhere on Nathan’s site is the result of a very talented person who practices data visualization ever day.
For me, the phrase, “a day in the life,” will always be associated with:
How does your average day compare to the average day? Or the average day in your office to the average day?