mathbabe

You all know I’m a data nerd. So here goes my little exploration into how #Occupy Wall Street has influenced the conversation. Go to Google trends page to try this for yourself. It’s super fun to play with and to anticipate what the graph will look like.

First, there’s the concept of “Occupy” itself.

occupy  1.00
Rank by   occupy

I’m happy to see that more people google for “Occupy protest” than for “dirty hippies”:

occupy protest  1.00 dirty hippies  0
Rank by   occupy protest dirty hippies

Next, let’s look at how #OWS has influenced the conversation. The interest in income inequality has definitely gone up:

ncome inequality  1.00
Rank by   income inequality

And the idea of looking at the top 1% and bottom 99% has definitely entered into our vocabulary:

1%  1.00 99%  0.50
Rank by   1% 99%

People also seem to be paying more attention to policy issues:

volcker rule  0.95 tobin tax  1.00
Rank by   volcker rule tobin tax

Please send me any other good search terms that you find! It’s too tempting to spend all day doing this…