Today is Rembrandt’s 400th birthday, though he hardly looks a day over 23. Rembrandt was well known in his time, though he lived beyond his means and declared bankruptcy 350 years ago. In the end, he was forced to sell everything, save some paint, a brush and canvas. Although he died poor, it’s unlikely that any private collector who owns his paintings today will. In December, 2000 his Portrait of a Lady fetched a cool $28.7 million.

During his lifetime, Rembrandt was prolific, producing more than 600 paintings. He took on so many apprentices, that art collectors are still trying to disambiguate the provenance of some works.

So where are his paintings now? A survey of 176 paintings finds that 80% of them remain in Europe. Most of the others are in the United States. German museums housed a quarter of the Rembrandts in the survey, 47 paintings in all. Over the past 400 years, 85% of Rembrandt’s paintings have left his native Netherlands, but the Dutch still have the distinction of owning the most Rembrandts per capita.

In 1972, the year Statastico was born, a penny was worth the equivalent of a 2006 nickel. Imagine if the U.S. Mint decided in 1972 to start making new coins called Fifths (with a portrait of James Monroe, naturally) and they were worth 1/5 of a cent. Well, we have them today and we call them pennies.

As recently as 2002, the U.S. Mint pulled in $24 million in seigniorage by producing pennies. No more. The Washington Post recently reported that because of rising zinc prices, the U.S. Mint is paying about 1.2 cents for every penny produced – not a very good return on investment.

Getting rid of pennies is a contentious issue. There is a pro-penny organization and people seem to attribute more value to a penny than it’s actual worth. Americans are frugal enough to pick a penny up off the street 76% of the time, though rich folks are more than twice as likely to leave that penny on the ground.

Indeed the mighty dollar’s biggest currency rival, the euro, also has 1 cent coins. However, businesses in Finland, the Netherlands and Greece commonly round to the nearest 5 cents to avoid those coins, so maybe the Europeans are onto something.

What about the rest of the world? Comparing a country’s most humble coins is a little tricky. A penny and a centavo both divide a major unit of currency by 100, but that’s where the similarity ends. First, you have to factor in the ebb and flow of exchange rates. Then it’s important to consider what a centavo buys locally, also known as purchasing power parity (PPP). One centavo might buy a whole mango in Guatemala, but it would only get you the mango’s stem in a U.S. grocery store.

So how worthless is the penny? Only the Chinese produce a more worthless coin (and we all know that their currency is undervalued). On the other end of the scale, the Japanese 1 yen coin is worth almost six times more than a U.S. penny in local wages.

And while we’re on the subject, have a look at our largest commonly used coin, the quarter. In coin-crazy Japan, they mint the most valuable coin in the world at currect exchange rates: The 500 yen coin is worth $4.33.

But once you factor in the lower local wages, it’s the Central and West African CFA (a vestigial franc from French colonial rule) that truly stands out. The 500 CFA coin - popular and convenient for highway bribes - is worth about 80% of the local hourly wage in Cameroon, the equivalent of a coin worth $16.50 in the U.S.!

Sources: Statastic research; Wikipedia; xe.com; IMF

*Notes: These are the highest and lowest value coins that commonly used in these selected countries. Coin currency equivalent was converted to dollars using exchange rate as of 7.13.06. Average hourly wages were calculated using the PPP of GDP per capita, and assume that workers toil 50 weeks per year, 40 hours per week.

Given the choice, Statastico would rather read expertise than opinion. Recent polls concentrate on the latter. More interesting, however, is the wide gap between the public’s opinion and the opinion of experts. So why the obsession with public opinion polling?

The media use polling data not only to guide their own stories and advertising, but often as the basis for stories. So reporting what people think to the people who are thinking it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

And then there are the politicians. They guide their district gerrymandering, their campaign messages and financing with public opinion polls. And of course politicians themselves also guide public opinion. Just look at how many times the phrase “addicted to oil” has appeared in the media, and you’ll understand why the public suddenly has a passion for energy independence.

But experts are polled less often. The Atlantic Monthly often polls its foreign policy experts, and Foreign Policy recently released polling data highlighting the divide between the experts and the public. These types of polls are crucial to moving debates forward.

So what informs public opinion? The average American is not devouring policy blogs, obsessing over exit strategies in Iraq, evaluating the efficiency of turning corn into ethanol; they’re not even reading newspapers. They’re thinking about what to have for dinner, searching for low airfares, and keeping up with the latest news about Brangelina.

The public is also increasingly fragmented. The Internet facilitates specialization of interests and opinion, so Americans who do pay attention to the news are more likely to get it from a partisan source. Public opinion polls supposedly help us understand the political climate, but politics are shaping that opinion. Polling the public on important issues is no more than politicians’ PR departments checking to see whether their messaging sticks.

So please poll the experts. Statastico doesn’t care what the American public thinks about pulling out of Iraq. We should care about what Iraqis think. We should care about what experts in the State Department think. Instead of obscuring scientific consensus as the Bush administration has done with global warming, help us understand possible solutions. Scientists and experts are not always right, of course. But politicians’ job is to listen to the experts and help the public understand real options for hard problems.

Sources:

1: http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm#earth

2: http://web1.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2006/TI-index/thepopularfront.html

3: http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1009a1GlobalWarming.pdf

4: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

The polling data about scientific consensus and global warming is based on a scientific review of 928 scientific papers related to global warming. None of the papers reviewed, “disagreed with the consensus position.” Several scientists do disagree with different aspects of global warming. Here is a list of scientists who disagree with the global warming consensus.

Today the U.S. Interstate Highway system celebrates its 50th birthday. A nationwide network of roads had been envisioned since the at least the 1930s, but it was the Cold War that provided the necessary political impetus for the ambitious network to get off the ground. And on June 29, 1956 Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act.

Initially, the system was intended to cover 40,000 miles of road, including 2,000 miles of existing toll roads. Today there are 46,837 miles in the national highway system, including 261 beltways, ushering millions of commuters from the suburbs and exurbs to work. These miles constitute only 3% of all roadway miles in the U.S. but they transport 8 times more vehicles than all other U.S. roads.

Media stories about the horrors of a crumbling system have marked the today’s anniversary. ABC reported that,

“Traffic jams, which annually cost the nation $200 billion in lost productivity, suggest that repairs and expansion of the system are long overdue.”

I’m not sure that $200 billion of traffic jams suggest that we need to repair and expand the system. It seems like we’ve already created an expansive system and that the results speak for themselves. In the last 50 years, we have increased the number of miles that each person drives annually by 271%, and we have 237 million vehicles on the road, nearly one car for every American of driving age.

I know we can do better. More cars! More roads! More traffic! But you’ll have to tune in tomorrow for the rest of statastico’s story about the future national highway system, including a bizarre twist ending …. But for now, here are some statastics with delicious lime-colored Smart car graphics.

^*Including passenger and commercial vehicles, there are currently an estimated 237,000,000 vehicles in the U.S. today.
^#In 1956, 168,903,031 Americans drove 626 billion miles annually. In 2006, 299,092,260 of us drive approximately 3 trillion miles annually.