Who cares about poverty in the summertime?

Apparently not too many people.

First I’ll come out and admit that I’m addicted to playing with Google trends. I find it a fascinating commentary on our collective consciousness and weirdly entertaining. So, I was looking at search trends on ‘poverty’ across the world and there are two things that I find intriguing. First, there seems to be decreasing search volumes over the past several years although there are increasing news references. This is puzzling. But more interesting was that it was oddly seasonal, dipping twice a year. Check it out:

A country by country view was revealing. The decreasing interest over time cannot be attributed to the USA but the seasonal trend is more apparent, dipping during the summertime and then again over Christmas.

I then checked out other English speaking countries. UK and Australia both had some seasonality, less apparent in the UK than Australia, and dipping at slightly different times of the year. Turns out the dips correspond to the academic calendar for each country.




I have no idea what to make of India:

But what’s up out there? Are teachers just assigning a lot of homework on poverty all over the world?