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This visualization of wealth allows viewers to understand the incomprehensibly large amount of money that Jeff Bezos and the rest of the 400 richest people own. While scrolling through the visualizer, it provides comparisons between how much Amazon workers make annually, how much it would cost to house every homeless veteran annually, and other major spending programs. A truly transformative interactive visualization.

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Jeff Bezos may be insanely rich, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to the combined wealth of his peers. The 400 richest Americans own about $3.2 trillion, which is more than the bottom 60% of Americans.

A trillion dollars is such a large figure, that you might as well say "eleventy gajillion zillion dollars." So in this section, we will try to understand the scale of this figure by looking at what could be accomplished with various chunks of this wealth.

Some will argue that using this wealth for public benefit is not possible, because it's "tied up" in stocks, and therefore inaccessible. This is just not true.

As we proceed, try to keep in mind: all of this wealth is controlled by a group so small, that they could fit on a single 747 airplane-with 260 seats left over.

Based on the cost of vaccines and the cost of delivery, it would take around $200 billion to vaccinate every person on earth, which is about 6% of the wealth currently controlled by 400 Americans. After paying for this vaccination program, these individuals would still be $40 billion richer than they were before the pandemic.

Even setting aside the desperate humanitarian need for a global vaccination, there is still a strong self-interested argument that wealthy countries should do it: the longer covid circulates in the world, the more chance of a vaccine resistant variant emerging, and undoing all the vaccine progress we've already made.

The World Health Organization is currently organizing a global vaccine donation program which aims to vaccinate about 20% of residents in poor countries by the end of 2021, and even that approach has substantial funding shortfalls.

Malaria is one of the worst infectious diseases ever visited on mankind, possibly killing more people than any other infectious disease in history. In the 20th century alone, malaria killed more people than the Black Death.

These figures are even more shocking when you learn that malaria overwhelmingly kills children; around two-thirds of malaria deaths each year are children under five. That's around 275,000 children.

All of these deaths are preventable. Treating and preventing malaria is a well understood science, universally practiced in the developed world.

It is estimated that malaria could be globally eradicated by 2030 for a cost around $1.84 per at-risk person per year, or around $100 billion total. This would be around 3% of the wealth currently possessed by the 400 richest Americans.

Around 800 children will die of malaria today. A small group of super rich people could stop it for a sum of money so small that they would likely never even notice its absence. But they choose not to.

Americans have about $81 billion in medical debt that is sufficiently past due as to appear on their credit report. These are generally small debts, with a median value of $207 dollars per person.

These debts hinder the credit of over 50 million Americans, and do long term damage to their housing, employment, and borrowing options. The cost of repaying this debt dollar-for-dollar would be around 2.5% of the wealth controlled by 400 Americans.

This situation looks even better once you understand that delinquent debt is often purchased for as little as 1% of its face value. This would make the total cost of eliminating all delinquent medical debt around $810 million. In 2020, the richest 400 Americans accrued this amount roughly every 29 hours.

Note that this figure includes only delinquent medical debt, not all medical debt. The value of all medical debt in America is not publicly known, but probably in the neighborhood of $300 billion, or 9% of the wealth controlled by 400 Americans.

As of 2021, around 38 million Americans lived in poverty. If Americans in poverty were a state, they would be second largest by population. There are more Americans living in poverty than the entire population of Canada.

Population of US States compared to poverty, 2021

Every single person in America could be lifted above the poverty line with a one-time cash subsidy of around $10,000 per impoverished family (and about $7,000 for impoverished individuals). The total cost would be $170 billion, a little over 5% of the wealth currently controlled by 400 individuals.

It may seem counter intuitive that a one-time subsidy could have any lasting impact on chronic poverty. But one of the surprising truths about poverty is that it's fluid. Americans move in and out of poverty many times throughout their lives, and one good year can have a massive and long lasting effect.

A wealth of data now supports the idea that one-time cash transfers can permanently transform a local economy. Given a sudden windfall, people invest in their future. They go back to school, obtain transportation, pay for childcare, pay down debilitating debts, and do any number of things to improve their career prospects and financial future.

This would not be a permanent fix for all Americans. Surely, some would quickly return to poverty, and others face debts so large that the subsidy would make little difference. But for tens of millions of Americans, this would be a life changing event. It would be a generation defining social program that reshapes our economy for decades to come.

Around 844 million people have no access to clean water of any kind. About the same number have no access to a toilet or latrine of any kind, and therefore defecate in the open.

Contaminated water is a major source of disease, including cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. It is estimated that contaminated water kills about 829,000 people every year, making it one of the world's biggest killers. The cost to provide clean water and waste disposal for everyone on earth would be about $240 billion, or 7.5% of the wealth controlled by the 400 richest Americans.

OK, now that we've established the scale of inequality in the United States, let's dare to dream a little bigger.

Paid maternity and paternity leave are estimated to cost around $12 billion per year. This is 0.39% of the wealth controlled by 400 Americans. It is 5% of the wealth they accrued in 2020 alone.

If they repeated this payment every year for the next 100 years, it would equal 39% of the wealth they control today.

This is a more complex program to estimate than the others considered on this page, because the expense would be continuous, rather than one-time, and the cost is highly variable based on the size of the benefit provided. Still, using the 5% endowment payout rule the super wealthy should be able to finance a family leave program about 12 times more generous than the one contemplated here forever and still get richer into perpetuity, even accounting for inflation.

There are about 128 million households in the United States. To give each one $10,000 would cost $1.28 trillion, or about 40% of the wealth controlled by 400 Americans.

As the coronavirus raged through America in 2020, working people were frequently presented with a seemingly impossible choice between death by premature reopening and an economic depression brought about through a continued quarantine. Unspoken in this false choice was the supposition that Americans could not pay their living expenses without either work or unsustainable government deficit spending-where else could the money have possibly come from?

These programs combined would completely transform our world. By redistributing this wealth, millions of lives would be saved. Billions would be rescued from poverty and disease. By inconveniencing just 400 people, the entire human race could advance to a new, unprecedented level of development.

And all of them would still be billionaires afterwards.

Is it really so radical to suggest that this is the right thing to do? Given the choice between millions of deaths, and slightly shrinking the fortunes of a few super rich people, how could anyone conclude that the death of millions is preferable?

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Jeff Bezos may be insanely rich, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to the combined wealth of his peers. The 400 richest Americans own about $3.2 trillion, which is more than the bottom 60% of Americans. A trillion dollars is such a large figure, that you might as well say "eleventy gajillion zillion dollars."

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In a year with so many world-shaking moments, our strongest visual stories covered impeachment, outbreak, caucuses, primaries, donations, delegates, shutdown, jobs, deaths, coughing, hospitals, testing, George Floyd, protests, tear gas, dreams, nursing homes, policing, the election, stimulus, symptoms, Beirut, power, the Supreme Court, ballots, wildfires, Trump's taxes, turnout, swing states, masks, results, A.I., voter shifts, I.C.U.s, pollution and vaccines. 2020: The Year in Visual Stories and Graphics.

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2020: The Year in Visual Stories and Graphics (Published 2020)

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In a year with so many world-shaking moments, our strongest visual stories covered impeachment, outbreak, caucuses, primaries, donations, dele­gates, shutdown, jobs, deaths, coughing, hos­pitals, test­ing, George Floyd, protests, tear gas, dreams, nursing homes, po­licing, the election, stimulus, symptoms, Beirut, power, the Supreme Court, ballots, wildfires, Trump's taxes, turn­out, swing states, masks, re­sults, A.I., voter shifts, I.C.U.s, pollut­ion and vaccines.

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Allows readers to make connections based on the data and information presented, better than they would if the visualizations weren't included throughout the story.

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https://carolinatogether.unc.edu/dashboard/

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UNC COVID-19 Dashboard | Carolina Together | UNC-Chapel Hill

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The University is now sharing information about COVID-19 clusters exclusively on the Carolina Together COVID-19 Cluster Notifications page and on University social media handles and no longer utilizing the Alert Carolina Emergency Notification system for these updates.

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Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Release: Employment Situation

Units:

Frequency:

Notes:

The unemployment rate represents the number of unemployed as a percentage of the labor force. Labor force data are restricted to people 16 years of age and older, who currently reside in 1 of the 50 states or the District of Columbia, who do not reside in institutions (e.g., penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

This rate is also defined as the U-3 measure of labor underutilization.

The series comes from the 'Current Population Survey (Household Survey)'

The source code is: LNS14000000

Suggested Citation:

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View data of the unemployment rate, or the number of people 16 and over actively searching for a job as a percentage of the total labor force.

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Gives a great breakdown of Bloomberg's spending across geography, industry, type of giving, institution, etc.

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In the fall of 2018, Emily's List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women's group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor, who had donated nearly $6 million to Emily's List over the years.

Days before the event, Mr. Bloomberg made blunt comments in an interview with The New York Times, expressing skepticism about the #MeToo movement and questioning sexual misconduct allegations against Charlie Rose, the disgraced news anchor. Senior Emily's List officials seriously debated withdrawing Mr. Bloomberg's invitation, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In the end, the group concluded it could not risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg. And when he addressed the luncheon on Sept. 24 - before an audience dotted with women clad in black, to show solidarity with Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault - Mr. Bloomberg demonstrated why.

"I will be putting more money into supporting women candidates this cycle than any individual ever has before," he declared.

It was not an idle pledge: Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $100 million helping Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections. Of the 21 newly elected lawmakers he supported with his personal super PAC, all but six were women.

The decision by Emily's List, to mute its misgivings and embrace Mr. Bloomberg as a mighty ally, foreshadowed the choice Mr. Bloomberg is now asking Democrats to make by anointing him their presidential nominee.

There are, after all, numerous dimensions to Mr. Bloomberg's persona and record that give Democrats pause. A former Republican who joined the Democratic Party in 2018, Mr. Bloomberg has long mingled support for progressive causes with more conservative positions on law enforcement, business regulation and school choice. He has often given voice to views that liberals find troubling: Over the past week, Mr. Bloomberg's campaign was on the defensive over past recordings that showed him linking the financial crisis to the end of discriminatory "redlining" practices in mortgage lending, and defending physically aggressive policing tactics as a deterrent against crime.

Yet in a primary campaign defined by Democrats' hunger to defeat President Trump, Mr. Bloomberg is also offering himself up as a person singularly equipped to do so - a figure of unique standing and resources, with a powerful set of alliances and a fearsome political machine to draw on. His political rise has become a test of the impact one man's wealth can have when he applies it to the political system with driving sophistication.

In less than three months as a candidate, Mr. Bloomberg has poured more than $400 million, and rapidly counting, into the campaign. But that figure pales in comparison with what he spent in prior years, positioning himself as a national leader with presidential ambitions.

A Times examination of Mr. Bloomberg's philanthropic and political spending in the years leading up to his presidential bid illustrates how he developed a national infrastructure of influence, image-making and unspoken suasion that has helped transform a former Republican mayor of New York City into a plausible contender for the Democratic nomination. If anything, his claim - and his support among anxious moderates - has grown stronger with the ascent of the "democratic socialist" Senator Bernie Sanders in early voting in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes. His personal fortune, built on a financial information and news company, is estimated at over $60 billion. It fuels an advocacy network that has directed policy in dozens of states and cities; mobilized movements to take on gun violence and climate change; rewritten election laws and health regulations; and elected scores of politicians to offices as modest as the school board and as lofty as the Senate.

"Clearly, over the last several elections, there has not been a more important donor to the Democratic Party than Michael Bloomberg," said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, who once chaired the Democratic National Committee. "He has led on guns. He has led on climate change. He has been involved in all these races."

In all, Mr. Bloomberg has spent at least $10 billion on his charitable and political pursuits. The vast majority has gone to philanthropy, for causes that reflect his personal interests and passions, including $3.3 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.

But The Times's examination - based on a review of years of campaign and nonprofit tax filings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people who have benefited from his support - illustrates how deeply that philanthropy is entwined with Mr. Bloomberg's political preoccupations. In fact, in 2019, the year he declared his presidential candidacy, Mr. Bloomberg's charitable giving soared to $3.3 billion - more than in the previous five years combined. His campaign disclosed that total in response to inquiries by The Times, but the donations were not itemized and most of it does not fall under public disclosure requirements.

Mr. Bloomberg has probably spent more from his personal fortune on his presidential campaign than any politician in American history. And while there have been political megadonors like the casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, philanthropic giants like Bill Gates and self-funded candidates like Ross Perot, never before has one presidential hopeful combined the influence and reach of all three.

It is not simply good will that Mr. Bloomberg has built. His political and philanthropic spending has also secured the allegiance or cooperation of powerful institutions and leaders within the Democratic Party who might take issue with parts of his record were they not so reliant on his largess.

In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr. Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration - a gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary.

"They aren't going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don't want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future," said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

That chilling effect was apparent in 2015 to researchers at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, when they turned in a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Their draft included a chapter of more than 4,000 words about New York City police surveillance of Muslim communities; Mr. Bloomberg was mentioned by name eight times in the chapter, which was reviewed by The Times.

When the report was published a few weeks later, the chapter was gone. So was any mention of Mr. Bloomberg's name.

Yasmine Taeb, an author of the report, said in an interview that the authors had been instructed to make drastic revisions or remove the chapter, and opted to do the latter rather than "whitewash the N.Y.P.D.'s wrongdoings." She said she found it "disconcerting" to be asked to remove the chapter "because of how it was going to be perceived by Mayor Bloomberg."

Other officials at the center disputed that account, arguing that there had been substantive reasons to revise or remove a section on police surveillance in New York from a report commissioned to examine right-wing groups targeting Muslims with explicit bigotry and conspiracy theories.

"Any and all edits to this report were done solely based on editorial and policy considerations," said a spokeswoman, Daniella Gibbs Léger. The center, she added, had produced other content addressing policing in New York, including a "critical, hard-hitting video" on department policies under Mr. Bloomberg. A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg said his team was unaware of any dispute at the think tank.

But at least one senior official wrote at the time that there would be a "strong reaction from Bloomberg world if we release the report as written," according to an email reviewed by The Times. And three people with direct knowledge of the situation said Mr. Bloomberg was a factor.

Alienating him might not have been a cost-free proposition. When the report came out, he had already given the organization three grants worth nearly $1.5 million, and in 2017 he contributed $400,000 more, according to Ms. Léger and the center's limited public disclosure of its donors.

Ms. Taeb, who left the center after the report was published, recently entered politics in Virginia. Now a member of the Democratic National Committee, she said she received a minute-long voice mail from Mr. Bloomberg in December.

"He said he was calling to introduce himself as a courtesy and wanted to sit down with me to tell me why he's running and why he has a chance," Ms. Taeb said, "and what he's done with the Democratic Party."

The Philanthropy Flood

Early in his second term as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg bought a six-story Beaux-Arts mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and outfitted it as part charity, part governance laboratory. It has become the hub of his empire - headquarters of Bloomberg Philanthropies and until recently the seat of his political operation.

It was during his 12 years at City Hall that Mr. Bloomberg wrote the playbook for propping up allies and co-opting opponents with a mix of political and charitable giving. Even as he spent $268 million on his three campaigns and made $23 million in campaign contributions to others, his philanthropy gave away $2.8 billion, much of it to civic and cultural groups around New York.

His philanthropy actually comprises three separate streams of money. But only one of them, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, is publicly accounted for. The Times's examination found billions of dollars in donations, under the Bloomberg Philanthropies umbrella, that had not been previously disclosed or itemized - corporate giving by his company, Bloomberg L.P., and from his personal checkbook.

In all, by his own accounting, Mr. Bloomberg has given away nearly $9.5 billion since 1997, at an annual rate that has increased more than a hundredfold. In 2018, the year before he announced for president, he spent nearly $770 million. Last year's $3.3 billion figure probably included a $1.8 billion donation to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, announced in November 2018. Even without it, his charitable giving roughly doubled.

His spending on electoral politics has also steadily increased, from about $11 million in 2013, his final year as mayor, to the more than $100 million during the 2018 midterms.

All of those funds flow not just from Bloomberg Philanthropies and Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC, Independence USA, but through an array of advocacy groups that rely on him for donations in the tens of millions of dollars. A number of them are cornerstones of liberal politics, including the Sierra Club, one of the country's most influential environmental groups, Planned Parenthood and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The foundation, along with Mr. Bloomberg's other entities, has become something of a talent stable for people he admires - public officials, business leaders and political strategists, among others. The foundation's board looks almost like a shadow administration, including luminaries like former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and current or former executives from companies including American Express, Disney and Morgan Stanley.

Much of his charitable giving has been largely detached from politics, focusing on areas like the arts, higher education and global public health. Aides are quick to point out that maternal health programs in Tanzania and motorcycle helmet promotions in Vietnam are not exactly winning Mr. Bloomberg primary votes. The biggest beneficiary of his giving has been Johns Hopkins.

Yet his domestic philanthropy has also overlapped with his political agenda, tying him closely to powerful progressive interest groups and amassing reservoirs of gratitude, admiration and influence across the country.

His relationship with the Sierra Club is a case in point. While he was still mayor, Mr. Bloomberg began expressing a keen interest in climate change. The Sierra Club had been working for years to block the construction of coal-fired power plants but wanted to go on the offensive, forcing aging plants offline. In the summer of 2011, Mr. Bloomberg stood on a barge on the Potomac River with the group's executive director, Michael Brune, to announce a $50 million gift to the group's Beyond Coal initiative, a figure that has since grown to over $100 million.

Separately, Mr. Bloomberg has deployed his political apparatus to advance the same agenda. In 2015, he announced that he would spend more than $10 million running ads against state attorneys general who were litigating against the Obama administration's efforts to regulate emissions. In 2018, he gave $5 million to the League of Conservation Voters, and partnered with the group to identify targets for his political giving, including elections for an obscure New Mexico panel that regulates energy utilities.

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, said the former mayor tended to approach his large-scale causes by seeking out trusted partners - political leaders or organizations - and using various parts of his operation to support them.

"When we identify strong, effective leaders, our view is that we should invest in them," he said.

That model of concentrating political and philanthropic spending has defined Mr. Bloomberg's approach in other arenas.

A champion of charter schools, Mr. Bloomberg has used his wealth in numerous ways to sway education policy in Louisiana. As mayor, he began giving relatively small donations, several thousand dollars each, to candidates in Louisiana school board races. But that investment sharply increased after a former New York City deputy schools chancellor, John White, became Louisiana's state education chief in 2012.

Mr. Bloomberg has made more than $5 million in political donations in the state, including $3.6 million to Empower Louisiana, an education-focused political committee chaired by a powerful Republican donor, and also backed Mitch Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans. Over the same period, Mr. Bloomberg gave nearly $15 million to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to promote charter schools, and his foundation gave nearly $3 million to the City of New Orleans. Two former senior aides to Mr. Landrieu are now helping lead Mr. Bloomberg's political strategy in the South and his national outreach to African-American voters.

Some places have become points of convergence for numerous strands of Mr. Bloomberg's agenda. In Washington State, he contributed more than $2 million to political committees focused on issues like gun control, carbon pricing, soda taxes and same-sex marriage. At the same time, he showered the City of Seattle with grant money for climate-related policy, and the Bloomberg-funded group Everytown for Gun Safety deployed lawyers there, first to help craft regulations and then to defend them in court.

The city's mayor, Jenny Durkan, now sits on the steering committee of C40 Cities, an alliance of mayors confronting climate change. Mr. Bloomberg is the head of its board. Even in a city like her own, Ms. Durkan said, Mr. Bloomberg stands out.

"There's a lot of wealth here, and I see a lot of people who are personally interested, to varying degrees," she said. "I've never seen the Mike Bloomberg package before."

Mr. Bloomberg's giving to Johns Hopkins has also intersected with his political advocacy. In Maryland, where the university is among the state's most prominent institutions, he spent more than a half-million dollars in 2014 seeking to elect a governor supportive of gun control. The Bloomberg name, politicians say, is well known throughout the state because of the institutions that carry it, most of all the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the school, said the foundation kept in close touch to monitor the projects it funded, track their attention in the media and connect recipients of Mr. Bloomberg's money with other people close to the former mayor.

"Sometimes they'll call us and say, 'There's a mayor who is interested in this - can you talk to them?'" said Dr. Sharfstein, who directs the Bloomberg American Health Initiative, built on a $300 million donation from Mr. Bloomberg.

The range and reach of Mr. Bloomberg's spending, experts say, cannot but play to his advantage in the presidential race.

"The fact that he can call in all these favors, all over the country - a normal person can't do that," said Adav Noti, chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center. "A normal person will never be able to do that."

Policy, the Bloomberg Way

On a national level, there is arguably no issue more closely associated with Mr. Bloomberg than gun control. Nor does any other issue better capture the tension between his preference for data-driven, incremental, top-down strategy and the surges of ambitious activism that have increasingly defined American politics.

It was a cause he embraced after winning re-election as mayor. On New Year's Day 2006, Mr. Bloomberg declared in his inaugural address that he saw an urgent duty "to rid our streets of guns, and punish all those who possess and traffic in these instruments of death."

That April, he convened a Gracie Mansion summit of 15 mayors from across the country, marking the beginning of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which within a few short months included more than 100 civic leaders from 44 states.

Soon enough, Mr. Bloomberg ramped up his spending on politics beyond New York. Frustrated at the flow of firearms from Virginia, a state with lax gun laws, Mr. Bloomberg tried to buoy candidates in the state's 2011 elections who shared his views.

Then, in 2013, he received a visitor in New York: Mr. McAuliffe, by then a candidate for governor of Virginia. He proposed to Mr. Bloomberg that he make the state a decade-long priority, with an eye toward empowering Democratic supporters of gun regulation.

"I walked out with a multimillion-dollar commitment that day," Mr. McAuliffe recalled.

Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $3 million in Virginia that year through his super PAC, helping propel Mr. McAuliffe to the governorship and electing a Democratic attorney general supportive of gun control, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. He has plowed millions more into the state since then, culminating last fall with a takeover of the state legislature by Democrats who are now seeking to pass a series of tougher gun laws.

Then, after leaving office in December 2013, Mr. Bloomberg began expanding his advocacy operation. He founded a new group, Everytown for Gun Safety, which has since spent tens of millions of dollars pushing for gun control measures, with considerable success in swing states like Colorado and Nevada.

Incorporated as a nonprofit, Everytown does not need to disclose its donors or most of its expenditures, but officials there say Mr. Bloomberg typically provides roughly one-third of the group's budget. While officials at Everytown said the group was ultimately independent, it is closely intertwined with Mr. Bloomberg's political operation.

Everytown is managed directly by one of Mr. Bloomberg's close lieutenants, John Feinblatt, a former New York deputy mayor whose wedding Mr. Bloomberg officiated in 2011. Numerous people connected to the group said it channeled Mr. Bloomberg's priorities, including his strong preference for working with both parties.

The organization came into existence through an almost corporate-style merger: Mr. Bloomberg already had a gun control group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but he needed a grass-roots army to compete with the National Rifle Association. So it joined forces with an existing activist group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, to form Everytown.

Moms Demand Action had sprung up on Facebook after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Volunteers organized into local chapters, held protests and lobbied for legislation. After a year of working long hours for no compensation, many volunteers were running on fumes and well aware their organization needed money.

Mr. Bloomberg promised to infuse the movement with $50 million, bringing his mayors' group and Moms Demand Action under the Everytown umbrella. According to his spokesman, Mr. Bloomberg has underwritten the gun control movement with a total of $270 million since 2007. But with his backing came a stark shift in culture and a rigid new command structure, one that left some activists feeling they were pawns in matching red T-shirts.

People involved in the group described being forced to communicate exclusively in canned talking points. Kate Ranta, shot twice by her ex-husband in front of her young son, was a member of Everytown's network of survivors. She was asked to address a rally on the steps of the Capitol, along with her son. Standing beside Nancy Pelosi, then the House minority leader, and Representative John Lewis, she found herself stumbling over the text she had been given.

"Someone from Everytown wrote my speech. It was pushing their legislative agenda versus my authentic voice," Ms. Ranta said. "I couldn't say 'gun control.' It was moderate messaging - 'gun safety' and 'gun violence prevention.'"

Other members greatly appreciated the new direction from Everytown. "A structure began to be put into place, and we could avail ourselves of the data that was offered so we could speak more intelligently," said June Rubin, a Moms Demand Action volunteer in New York. "So we're focused and single-issue and highly recognizable and speaking with one voice, and it's powerful."

The policy agenda was to be focused on tightening background checks; more radical ideas like banning assault weapons were off the table. "There were people who were very, very troubled by that," Ms. Rubin said. "I became very pragmatic."

More confrontational tactics were also rejected. After the mass shooting last year at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., other groups organized protests to pressure the retailer to change its policies. But Moms members were discouraged from attending and told not to show any affiliation if they did. One Moms official told volunteers in a closed Facebook group that doing otherwise could "undercut our relations with responsible gun owners whose support we need."

"Our goal is always to get results, and sometimes that means playing the outside game and sometimes it requires playing the inside game and working with partners who have shown themselves to be amenable to change," said Maxwell Young, chief of public affairs for Everytown. "We've found Walmart to be an ally on gun safety and an example of a leader always willing to engage in productive conversations."

Mr. Bloomberg also insisted on a strategy of bipartisanship, frustrating activists who saw the Republican Party as unalterably opposed to their goals. In 2016, he spent nearly $12 million to re-elect Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, a Republican supportive of background checks but strongly conservative on nearly everything else.

Lisa Boswell, a former Moms volunteer who got involved after the Sandy Hook shooting, said activists in Pennsylvania were ignored. "While the ground volunteers were very much opposed to this idea, the decision was going to be made at a higher level, without taking those views into consideration," she said.

Mr. Wolfson said that in the wake of Sandy Hook, Mr. Bloomberg felt strongly that Mr. Toomey's support for background checks represented "an extremely important moment." Mr. Bloomberg's view, he said, was that "if you are asking someone to take a strong bipartisan stand in support of an absolute key priority, you want to be supportive of them."

In 2018, even as Mr. Bloomberg was spending nine figures to defeat congressional Republicans, Everytown backed another Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, for re-election. A number of local volunteers, who said they had been assured that Everytown had no plans to support Mr. Fitzpatrick, quit to form their own gun control organization.

Former members of Moms Demand Action, who had been cut off from private Facebook groups and blocked by leadership on Twitter, were surprised when they received emails from Mike Bloomberg 2020. Then they learned his campaign had rented the group's email list, for $3.2 million, two days before he announced his candidacy in November.

At least a half-dozen former Everytown and Moms Demand Action officials have joined the Bloomberg campaign, including senior political and legal strategists and the deputy director of the Survivors Network. Spokespersons for both the Bloomberg camp and Everytown said that they had put up a firewall in the campaign, and that there was no coordination between the two entities.

In his campaign, Mr. Bloomberg has proposed a gun control agenda that goes far beyond Everytown's, including a ban on assault-style weapons and a national licensing system.

When Mr. Bloomberg spent roughly $10 million on a Super Bowl commercial this month, he chose to focus his 60-second spot entirely on gun control. The emotional ad featured Calandrian Simpson-Kemp, whose son had been shot and killed, and who previously appeared in videos for Everytown, wearing the distinctive red Moms Demand Action T-shirt.

Powerful Alliances

In the presidential race, Mr. Bloomberg has activated his sprawling network of allies to great effect - drawing on his foundation and its beneficiaries to build a campaign staff, and calling on politicians he has supported in the past for their endorsements.

It is that network, as much as the raw force of his campaign spending, that has propelled Mr. Bloomberg into contention in the Democratic race. He is not the only candidate spending hundreds of millions of dollars promoting himself: Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund investor, has spent at least $243 million of his fortune on the race but has struggled to win support.

Mr. Bloomberg's trajectory has been different. He has climbed to the top rank of contenders, even catching up to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in some national polls.

Since the start of his campaign, more than 50 employees of Bloomberg Philanthropies have moved across town to his Times Square campaign headquarters as paid staff members, including the foundation's chief executive, Patricia E. Harris, a former New York deputy mayor, and James Anderson, previously the foundation's head of government innovation.

Overnight, Ms. Harris and Mr. Anderson went from providing cities around the country with grants to contacting mayors for support. Dozens of current and former mayors have since endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, including leaders from major cities like Houston, Memphis, Tampa and Washington.

Two prominent Democratic leaders with direct ties to the foundation quickly renounced their support for Mr. Biden after Mr. Bloomberg joined the race. Former Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia, a fellow attached to Mr. Bloomberg's What Works Cities initiative, became a paid adviser to the campaign. Manny Diaz, the former mayor of Miami and a paid board member at Bloomberg Philanthropies, defected from Mr. Biden to Mr. Bloomberg several weeks later.

Mr. Bloomberg's campaign commercials have featured his crusades against coal, tobacco companies and the N.R.A. And he has continued to dole out money to the party - giving $10 million to a super PAC supporting House Democrats, $5 million to a voting-rights group led by Stacey Abrams, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee as well as dozens of state parties. The D.N.C. recently revised its debate-qualification standard to make it possible for someone like Mr. Bloomberg, who does not accept political donations, to participate, drawing accusations of favoritism from other campaigns.

One of the first members of Congress to endorse Mr. Bloomberg was Representative Stephanie Murphy of Florida. Elected in 2016 as a champion of gun control, Ms. Murphy said she had worked closely with Everytown on legislation, and said Mr. Bloomberg had shown his political mettle by backing groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood.

"All of these are organizations that supported and endorsed my campaign in '16 and '18," Ms. Murphy said. "This is a guy who puts his money where his mouth is."

Mr. Bloomberg has promised to do just that in the general election, spending aggressively to defeat Mr. Trump no matter who the nominee is. But advisers to Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged the scale and focus of his spending would differ, depending on whether he is the Democratic standard-bearer.

"If Mike Bloomberg is the nominee, he will ensure that the Democratic Party has the greatest funding in its history," Mr. Wolfson said, describing a plan to guarantee "all 50 states have the resources that Democrats need to compete up and down the ballot."

If Mr. Bloomberg is not nominated, Mr. Wolfson suggested a narrower focus. "If you're trying to defeat Donald Trump and you're not on the ballot, you're going to focus on the battleground states," he said.

There are places where Mr. Bloomberg's past spending has left a less helpful mark for his campaign: Pennsylvania may be one of them, since some Democrats there still resent his past support for Mr. Toomey. Teacher unions view Mr. Bloomberg with distrust because of his donations to school-choice groups and his charter-friendly policies as mayor.

But in most places he has ventured as a candidate, Mr. Bloomberg's many years of largess have helped earn him a warm reception.

During the week of the Iowa caucuses, he toured California with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, for whom Mr. Bloomberg spent millions in a 2018 gubernatorial race, and San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a beneficiary of Bloomberg foundation grants. He visited Providence, R.I., to be endorsed by Gov. Gina Raimondo, a moderate Democrat whose election Mr. Bloomberg aided in 2014. And he got an endorsement from Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, for whom Mr. Bloomberg's super PAC spent more than $2 million in the last midterm elections.

Some of his biggest endorsements have come out of cities that have been focal points for his philanthropy. In the Bay Area, Mr. Bloomberg's foundation has distributed dozens of grants to museums, dance companies and climate organizations, while his political donations have funded school board candidates and referendums to tax soda and ban e-cigarettes. San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, endorsed Mr. Bloomberg last month, hailing his "ability to beat Trump."

Mr. Wolfson said no promises had been made to Mr. Bloomberg's endorsers about what they could expect from him down the line. "I haven't had a single conversation with anyone where I suggested or implied any future support, nor did anyone ask for it," he said.

So far, most lawmakers Mr. Bloomberg supported in 2018 have not endorsed him, but in interviews several acknowledged that his status as a patron of the party was weighing on their thinking. Sitting down with members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition on Capitol Hill last month, Mr. Bloomberg was greeted by a sequence of thank-yous from House members he backed in 2018, according to two lawmakers present.

Representative Scott Peters of California, a San Diego Democrat who endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, said he had been struck by the expressions of gratitude from his colleagues when Mr. Bloomberg visited the Hill.

"We know who he is - he's a successful executive in business, he's a successful executive in public life as mayor," Mr. Peters said in an interview, adding, "We often say our checkbook is our values, and it was evident through his philanthropy that he shared my values on issues like gun safety and immigration and climate change."

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Bloomberg's Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence (Published 2020)

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In the fall of 2018, Emily's List had a dilemma. With congressional elections approaching and the Supreme Court confirmation battle over Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh underway, the Democratic women's group was hosting a major fund-raising luncheon in New York. Among the scheduled headline speakers was Michael R.

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These images allow the viewer to get a feel for the scope and atmosphere of given protests across the United States. They give the audience a sense of what it was like to be at an event they weren't actually present for.

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In small towns and large cities, many thousands flooded the streets on Saturday to protest racism and police violence in response to the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. Saturday was the 12th day of protests.

Across the United States

Around the World

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Bird's Eye View of Protests Across the U.S. and Around the World (Published 2020)

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In small towns and large cities, many thousands flooded the streets on Saturday to protest racism and police violence in response to the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. Saturday was the 12th day of protests.

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It seems simple: Stop travel, stop the virus from spreading around the world.

Here's why that didn't work.

The true size of the outbreak was much larger even then - an invisible network of nearly 1,000 cases, or perhaps several times more.

Estimates from Trevor Bedford, Hutchinson Center and University of Washington, and Lauren Gardner, Johns Hopkins University

With each patient infecting two or three others on average, even a perfect response may not have contained the spread.

But Chinese officials did not alert the public to the risks in December. It wasn't until Dec. 31 that they alerted the World Health Organization and released a statement - and a reassurance.

"The disease is preventable and controllable," the government said.

The timing of the outbreak could not have been worse. Hundreds of millions of people were about to travel back to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year.

Here's how people moved around on Jan. 1, according to a Times analysis of data published by Baidu and major telecoms, which tracked the movements of millions of cell phones.

Travel volume on Jan. 1.Minor routes not shown.

At least 175,000 people left Wuhan just on that day, we found.

The departures from Wuhan accelerated over the next three weeks. About7 million people left in January, before travel was restricted.

Thousands of travelers were infected.

Red dots show proportion of infected travelers, based on estimates from Jeffrey Shaman, Columbia University.

By the time Chinese officials acknowledged the risk of human-to-human transmission on Jan. 21, local outbreaks were already seeded in Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities.

Two days later, the authorities locked down Wuhan, and many cities followed in the next few weeks. Travel across China nearly stopped.

But local outbreaks were already growing quickly.

As the outbreak moved across China in early January, international travel continued as normal.

Recent air travel, based on first quarter 2019 data from O.A.G.

About 85 percent of infected travelers went undetected, researchers believe. But they were still contagious.

Infected people, based on estimates by Jeffrey Shaman

It was too late. Outbreaks were already growing in over 30 cities across 26 countries, most seeded by travelers from Wuhan.

The virus started spreading locally, moving easily in confined spaces like churches and restaurants, and infecting people who had not traveled to China - the start of a pandemic.

In fact, as China started systematically testing, tracing and isolating patients, new cases there declined dramatically, showing that it was possible to slow the virus. Similar measures slowed the spread in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea.

Notes:
The cases shown in each world city include those in the broader metropolitan area or region and include patients who were transferred and treated there.

Data sources:
Travel patterns across China are based on data published by Baidu, and data from two Chinese telecoms published by Cao et al., " Incorporating Human Movement Data to Improve Epidemiological Estimates for 2019-nCoV." Both sources tracked the movements of cell phones.

Estimates of the size of the early outbreak in Wuhan are from Trevor Bedford, associate professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington; Bedford, "Phylodynamic estimation of incidence and prevalence of novel coronavirus infections through time"; and Lauren Gardner, associate professor and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering; Gardner et al., "Update January 31: Modeling the Spreading Risk of 2019-nCoV."

Estimates of the number of infected people who left Wuhan are from Jeffrey Shaman, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia; and Li et al., "Substantial undocumented infection facilitates the rapid dissemination of novel coronavirus."

Normal air travel patterns from Wuhan are from 2019 data from OAG. Travel patterns in 2020 are from Cirium.

Case data from Times reporting; local governments and health officials; The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University; National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China; and the World Health Organization.

Additional sources:
* Elizabeth Halloran, professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington and researcher at the Hutchinson Center
* Alessandro Vespignani, professor and director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University
* Chinazzi et al., "The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak"
* Arthur L. Reingold, professor and division head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California at Berkeley
* Benjamin F. Maier and Dirk Brockmann, "Effective containment explains sub-exponential growth in confirmed cases of recent COVID-19 outbreak in Mainland China"

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It seems simple: Stop travel, stop the virus from spreading around the world. Here's why that didn't work. The true size of the outbreak was much larger even then - an invisible network of nearly 1,000 cases, or perhaps several times more.

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Interactive map that shows the changing population of New York based on day and time, allowing the audience to get a better understanding of how the population evolves in Manhattan throughout a given week.

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Measuring just 13 miles long by 2 miles wide, New York City's most-famous borough has a well-earned reputation for shoebox-sized apartments, shoulder-to-shoulder subway commutes, and cubicle-farm high-rises. Though the US Census provides a cozy estimate of 1.6 million people calling Manhattan 'home', the island's true population swells considerably, like clock-work, every Monday through Friday. Obtaining upper bounds on the workday population of Manhattan is no easy task, and the NYU Wagner School has ballparked a peak estimate of about 4 million people, representing an influx of roughly the population of Houston every workday. To put this in perspective, if Manhattan were a state, it would sit just above Oregon at 27th on a list of U.S. states ranked by population every afternoon.

Though the upper and lower bound for Manhattan's dynamic population provides an interesting point of conversation, the question of how Manhattan's population is distributed hour-by-hour, neighborhood-by-neighborhood is of importance to urban planners, public safety managers, and armchair geographers alike. By no means does Manhattan's population spread out evenly across the length of island- one can imagine the Empire State Building being filled to the brim with inter-state workers by late morning, while at the same time much of the working-age population of Inwood has migrated away from its sleepy uptown hamlet. Finding appropriate sources for estimating the dynamic population was part of a research project undertaken by Justin Fung while studying at Columbia University under the direction of former NYC Transportation Commissioner Lucius J. Riccio, and ultimately, a transit-based solution was found right under their feet. Considering the 'vehicle-of-choice' for most Manhattanites is one of the MTA's 6,500 stainless-steel subway cars, and that the nearly 150 stations serving Manhattan provide reasonably-uniform coverage across the island, it stood to reason that subway entrance and exit data would be a pretty good proxy for population distribution across the city.

Using the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's freely-available turnstile database and Steven Romalewski's MTA subway data in GIS format, estimates for the net flows of people in and out of Manhattan neighborhoods were made on an hour-by-hour basis both historically and for future dates. A time-series analysis of this data confirms that usage patterns are heavily dependent on time, day, and location. The visualization contained herein is the realization of a model of these flows for a hypothetical week in late Spring. As you click around Manhattan, you may uncover both obvious and not-so-obvious patterns, and perhaps even find a good time to take a stress-free bike ride around the block.

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Measuring just 13 miles long by 2 miles wide, New York City’s most-famous borough has a well-earned reputation for shoebox-sized apartments, shoulder-to-shoulder subway commutes, and cubicle-farm high-rises. Though the US Census provides a cozy estimate of 1.6 million people calling Manhattan ’home…

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U.S. population demographics predictions - interactive map

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U.S. population demographics predictions - interactive map

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Two Dramas in Slow Motion

Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion. America is in the midst of two right now. Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era. The fact that both are unfolding simultaneously has generated big generation gaps that will put stress on our politics, families, pocketbooks, entitlement programs and social cohesion.

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The Pew Research Center tracks these transformations with public opinion surveys and demographic and economic analyses. Our new book, The Next America, draws on this research to paint a data-rich portrait of the many ways our nation is changing and the challenges we face in the decades ahead.

Let's start with what demographers call an "age pyramid." Each bar represents a five year age cohort; with those ages 0-4 on the bottom and those ages 85 and older on the top. In every society since the start of history, whenever you broke down any population this way, you'd always get a pyramid.

But from 1960 to 2060, our pyramid will turn into a rectangle. We'll have almost as many Americans over age 85 as under age 5. This is the result of longer life spans and lower birthrates. It's uncharted territory, not just for us, but for all of humanity. And while it's certainly good news over the long haul for the sustainability of the earth's resources, it will create political and economic stress in the shorter term, as smaller cohorts of working age adults will be hard-pressed to finance the retirements of larger cohorts of older ones.

The New Us

America's Racial Tapestry Is Changing

At the same time our population is going gray, we're also becoming multi-colored. In 1960, the population of the United States was 85% white; by 2060, it will be only 43% white. We were once a black and white country. Now, we're a rainbow.

Our intricate new racial tapestry is being woven by the more than 40 million immigrants who have arrived since 1965, about half of them Hispanics and nearly three-in-ten Asians.

Because these tranformations happen tick by tock, without anyone announcing them with a drum roll or press conference, they are sometimes hard to perceive.

But every so often societies experience "aha" moments, when the change is right there in plain sight. We had several such moments in early 2014, as three iconic American brands, Coke, Chevy and Cheerios, rolled out ads during the Super Bowl and Olympics that were aimed at what one voice-over called "the new us."

Product advertisers aren't in the business of making political statements. They're certainly not in the business of making enemies. They must have known some of their images - interracial families, same-sex parents, "America the Beautiful" sung in several languages - would disturb some of their customers. But they also do their market research and look at their numbers. They know how fast the country is changing.

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"Intermarriage is playing a big role in changing some of our views of ethnicity."Mark Lopez - Director of Hispanic Research

Immigration Is Driving Our Demographic Makeover

Our modern immigrants are different from the big waves of newcomers who came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Back then, about nine-in-ten immigrants were from Europe. Today only about 12% are from Europe.

But some things don't change. No matter where they come from, immigrants are strivers. They're optimists. And they tend to have a lot of kids. Our immigrant stock - that's immigrants and their children - is projected to make up about 37% of our population by mid-century, the highest share in our history.

But understand: this isn't new. We've always been a nation of settlers and immigrants. In this regard, the middle of the 20th century wasn't the norm, it was the outlier.

Intermarriage Blurs Labels

Here's an interesting question: By 2050, will our racial categories still make much sense? These days our old labels are having trouble keeping up with our new weddings. A half century ago racial intermarriage was illegal in a third of the states and a gasp-inducing taboo just about everywhere else. Today, nearly one-in-six newlyweds marry across racial or ethnic lines.

Changing Perception of 'Mixed Race'

More than a quarter of Hispanic and Asian newlyweds "marry out," as do one-in-six blacks and one-in-ten whites. Whites are still the largest race group, so even though they "marry out" at lower rates, they still account for 70% of all interracial marriages.

By mid-century, what will we call the children of interracial marriages? Today we aren't even sure what to call our president. We do know this: In many cultures and societies through history, being mixed race - being a "mutt" as Obama sometimes calls himself - has meant being an outcast. In today's America, judging by those Super Bowl ads or today's celebrities, the norms are changing and the stigma receding.

Today's Celebrities Reflect America's Demographic Shifts

You probably know the names of these celebrities. Do you know their racial and ethnic ancestry?

The Generational Divide

Portraits of America

Generations tend to be about 20 years in length and are shaped by the historical events people experience at roughly the same stage in their life cycle. As a result, they share what might loosely be called a generational persona, one that's also influenced by (and often in reaction to) the persona of their parents' generation.

While obviously there are as many different personality types within a generation as across generations, there's value in understanding what defines a generation. Pew Research surveys have allowed for comparisons between today's young and today's old. Because we've been asking the same questions over many years, we can also compare today's young with yesterday's young. Let's start with the thumbnail sketches.

Who Are the Millennials?

The Millennials are our youngest adult generation. They're America's most racially and ethnically diverse generation ever. More than four-in-ten are non-white, many the U.S.-born children of the big wave of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who began arriving half a century ago.

They're political and social liberals, they're social media wizards, they're highly educated, they're not very religious, they're slow to marry and have kids, and many are saddled with college debt and lousy jobs. Because of their difficulties getting launched in a tough economy, 46% have at some point boomeranged back to their childhood homes, where the refrigerator is stocked, the washing machine isn't coin-operated, and all their dreams are on hold, but intact. Despite these economic woes, Millennials are the nation's most dogged optimists. They believe their own best days are ahead - and so are America's.

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"10,000 Baby Boomers a day will turn 65 - every single day between now and the year 2030."Paul Taylor - Author, The Next America

The Age, Race Voting Gaps

In the past few elections, the young/old partisan voting gap has been the biggest since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972. As recently as the year 2000, there had been no difference in the way young and old in America voted. Now, there's a chasm.

Six-in-ten young voters supported Barack Obama in his re-election bid in 2012, compared with just 47% of those in the age ranges of their parents (45 to 64) and 44% of their grandparents (65 and older). By race, six-in-ten white voters supported Republican candidate Mitt Romney, whereas more than nine-in-ten black voters supported Obama. Obama also captured more than 70% of the Asian-American and Hispanic vote.

Liberal Youth, Conservative Elders

Millennials have voted more Democratic than older voters in the past five national elections. They came of age in the Bush and Obama eras and hold liberal attitudes on most social and governmental issues, as well as America's approach to foreign policy.

Just as members of the Silent Generation are long-term backers of smaller government, Millennials, at least so far, are strong supporters of a more activist government.

On some social issues, such as legalizing marijuana and same-sex marriage, Millennials particularly stand out for their favorable views compared with other generations. Nearly seven-in-ten (68%) Millennials favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry, compared with just 48% of Baby Boomers and just 38% of the Silent Generation.

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"Voter turnout among Millennials has been remarkably solid."Michael Dimock - Vice President, Research

The Young Are Less Religiously Affiliated

The generations are divided by more than race and politics. The young are the least religiously affiliated group in modern American history; the old are the most devout believers in the advanced, industrialized world.

A record one-in-five American adults today - and fully three-in-ten Millennials - do not have any religious affiliation. Of these so-called "nones," roughly three-in-ten describe themselves as atheists or agnostics; the remainder say they have no particular religion.

The Technology Gap

Then there's the technology revolution. Today's young are history's first generation of digital natives. The online world isn't something they've had to adapt to - it's all they've ever known, and it's their indispensable platform for social interactions and information acquisition.

Today's old have been playing catch-up online, some more enthusiastically than others, but they have a long way to go. The typical Millennial who uses social media has 250 Facebook friends - making them five times "friendlier" than the smaller number of Silents who use social media.

The Showdown

We Have a Big Challenge Ahead

At a time when young and old don't look alike, think alike or vote alike, how will America modernize its entitlement programs so they're in sync with its new demographics? How can we keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future? It will be difficult.

Support for Retirement

We start with this reality: Social Security and Medicare are practically sacrosanct. Nearly nine-in-ten Americans say they're good for the country. That's an amazing number. But the popularity of these programs really isn't all that surprising. People love them because they do what they were created to do. They ease many of the frets and dreads of old age - a blessing not just for seniors but for everyone who loves, supports and depends on seniors. Which is to say, everyone.

Saving the Safety Net

Changing Worker-Beneficiary Ratio

The first monthly Social Security benefit check was issued in 1940. By 1945 there were 42 workers for every beneficiary. In 1950, sixteen-to-one. In 2010 there were only three workers for each person in retirement.

But the status quo is unsustainable. Some 10,000 Baby Boomers will be going on Social Security and Medicare every single day between now and 2030. By the time everyone in this big pig-in-the-python generation is drawing benefits, we'll have just two workers per beneficiary - down from three-to-one now, five-to-one in 1960 and more than forty-to-one in 1945, shortly after Social Security first started supporting beneficiaries.

The math of the 20th century simply won't work in the 21st. Today's young are paying taxes to support a level of benefits for today's old that they have no realistic chance of receiving when they become old. And they know it - just 6% of Millennials say they expect to receive full benefits from Social Security when they retire. Fully half believe they'll get nothing.

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"I think the Boomers are feeling in better shape than the generation that's right behind them."Kim Parker - Director of Social Trends Research

Over the Horizon

Meantime, the cost of our programs for seniors will soon exceed half of the federal budget. This spending continues to crowd out budgeting for education, research and infrastructure - investments that would help build a better future for Millennials and their children.

At its core, this is a problem of generational equity. But it need not lead to a generation war. A war needs combatants. We find very little evidence from our Pew Research surveys that old and young are spoiling for a fight over these issues. To the contrary, they like each other too much. And nowadays more than 50 million, a record, are living in multi-generational family households, their fortunes braided together, because that turns out to be a good way to make ends meet in hard times.

If Americans can bring to the public square the same genius for generational interdependence they bring to their family lives, the politics of these issues will become less toxic and the policy choices less forbidding.

That's a big 'if.' But it's a start.

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Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion. America is in the midst of two right now. Our population is becoming majority non-white at the same time a record share is going gray. Each of these shifts would by itself be the defining demographic story of its era.

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Breaking Boundaries uses data visualization to represent thresholds that we must avoid to mitigate the effects of climate change.

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Watch Breaking Boundaries: The Science Of Our Planet | Netflix Official Site

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David Attenborough and scientist Johan Rockström examine Earth's biodiversity collapse and how this crisis can still be averted. Watch trailers & learn more.

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This site visually illustrates the causes of gun deaths in the US.

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This interactive graphic is part of our project exploring the more than 33,000 annual gun deaths in America and what it would take to bring that number down. See our stories on suicides among middle-age men, homicides of young black men and accidental deaths, or explore the menu for more coverage.
Methodology
The data in this interactive graphic comes primarily from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Multiple Cause of Death database, which is derived from death certificates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia and is widely considered the most comprehensive estimate of firearm deaths. In keeping with the CDC's practice, deaths of non-U.S. residents that take place in the U.S. (about 50 per year) are excluded. All figures are averages from the years 2012 to 2014, except for police shootings of civilians, which are from 2014.

The "homicides" category includes deaths by both assault and legal intervention (primarily shootings by police officers). "Young men" are those ages 15 to 34; "women" are ages 15 and older. Because the CDC's estimates of police shootings are unreliable, we used estimates from non-governmental sources. Our figure is for 2014, the first year for which such estimates are generally available. (For more on the data we used, see Carl Bialik's story on police shootings.)

For shootings of police officers, we used the FBI's count of law enforcement officers "feloniously killed" by firearms in the line of duty. This figure excludes accidental shootings. The FBI counts all killings of federal, state and local law enforcement officers who meet certain criteria, including that they were sworn officers who ordinarily carried a badge and a gun.

For mass shootings, we used Mother Jones's database of public mass shootings. For 2012 and earlier, Mother Jones includes only incidents in which at least four people (excluding the shooter) were killed; beginning in 2013, Mother Jones lowered the threshold to three fatalities. In order to use a consistent definition, we excluded the one incident in 2013-14 in which exactly three people were killed.

For terrorism gun deaths, we used the University of Maryland's Global Terrorism Database. Our count of fatalities excludes perpetrators killed during their attacks. There was one incident, the 2012 attack on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, that qualified as both an act of terrorism and a mass shooting. Seven law-enforcement officers were killed in incidents that the terrorism database classifies as acts of terrorism.

Population totals (used to calculate death rates per 100,000 people) are based on 2012-14 American Community Survey microdata from the University of Minnesota's IPUMS project. As a result, death rates will not perfectly match official figures from the CDC, which are based on a different set of numbers from the Census Bureau. Racial and ethnic categories are mutually exclusive: All people who were designated as Hispanic in the CDC data are coded as "Hispanic" in ours; all other racial categories are non-Hispanic. "Native American" includes American Indians and Alaska Natives.

Data and code for this project are available on our GitHub page.
Additional contributions by Kshitij Aranke. David Nield contributed research.

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The data in this interactive graphic comes primarily from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Multiple Cause of Death database, which is derived from death certificates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia and is widely considered the most comprehensive estimate of firearm deaths.

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This link highlights how data can become quickly out of date, so interactive visualizations are important. This shows present-day data for the map of Florida

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This link highlights how data can become quickly out of date, so interactive visualizations are important. This shows present-day data for the map of Florida

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Data Visualizations are a great way to to present data that involves a large number of subjects. COVID-19 is a great example of a topic where data visualizations can help the audience to understand the scale of things such as hospitalizations, percentages of breakthrough cases, etc. Numbers can give you information, but visuals help to understand them.

# data[].attributes.subject
Data Visualizations are a great way to to present data that involves a large number of subjects. COVID-19 is a great example of a topic where data visualizations can help the audience to understand the scale of things such as hospitalizations, percentages of breakthrough cases, etc. Numbers can give you information, but visuals help to understand them.

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Think about the data visualizations you experienced.  Which ones were most effective?   Why? What parts of the stories were most influential when data were used?  What information was clearly understood ?  What are some examples of other data visualizations you believe are effective? Put their links here.

# data[].attributes.subject
Think about the data visualizations you experienced.  Which ones were most effective?   Why? What parts of the stories were most influential when data were used?  What information was clearly understood ?  What are some examples of other data visualizations you believe are effective? Put their links here.