A map of Guinness prices in the US. Compare with disposable income, purchasing power and the local Irish population. Hover or click on the states for exact figures.
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Map not displaying correctly? Need the source code? Click here for an easier-to-view page. (Recommended) Click here for a link to the data.
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A few weeks back, I was listening to the David McWilliams podcast (Aug 20: 17:32). It’s a show which makes economics fairly simple and accessible and I often enjoy it.
In that episode, D4 Dave made a point about the Big Mac Index and how it’d be interesting to see a similar thing done for Guinness. Now, I’m not about to devote a semester to this topic but I found the question interesting enough to devote a few hours to.
So I found some data for the US – not high-quality but global data was much harder to get. I organised it and then programmed a little site. I say programmed but I actually used AI tools (Claude and o1-preview) for 95% of the work. Instead of using patty-power parity to think about exchange rates, I used pint-power parity to think about income/cost of living in different states.
A bit of polish and a fight to the death to relearn how to git push, and this is what we got.
My favourite setups are RPP:GuinnessPrice, GuinnessPrice:CustomPrice and the IrishAncestry and IrishPopulation maps.
I think the more interesting point here though is that this could be done in a few hours, knowing barely any JavaScript or CSS or even the data sources really, just by leveraging AI tools effectively. I haven’t done a fun project like this in a while and AI made it unbelievably easy to get started and get it done. With proper prompting and clearer planning on my part, this task could’ve been a 2-shot problem I reckon.
Embed below: