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I love how none of these charts use 0 as a base for the y-axis. Lies, damned lies, statistics...

chirau 10y ago
What article are you reading? If we are reading the same article then look at the charts under the following subheadings: David Doyle, economist at Macquarie Capital Markets Ltd. Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank AG. Jordan Rochester, foreign-exchange strategist at Nomura. Barnaby Martin, European credit strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Fielding Chen and Tom Orlik, economists at Bloomberg Intelligence. ...haters are going to hate, I suppose.
- sesqu 10y ago
  What all of those graphs have in common is that they depict datapoints near or below zero, so they necessarily must include the zero. The only exceptions to this rule are Chen and Orlik's graph, for which the data only goes down to 1, yet they decided to start at 0, and Sen's graph, which ranges from 1.8, yet he went all the way down to 1. For comparison, Feroli's data has a strictly positive range, but the graph starts at -5. Martin even went so far as to include two y-axes on the same graph, yet only one of them started at 0.
twblalock 10y ago
> I love how none of these charts use 0 as a base for the y-axis. Lies, damned lies, statistics... Articles written for an informed audience don't need to dumb down their charts by starting at zero. The authors assume the readers have eyes and can see where the charts begin and end. For the specific article in question, the lowest value on the chart is 1.450, and dropping the axis down to zero would not add any useful information; it would just add whitespace. It's a chart with linear axes that is sized to capture the entire range of data. There is no trickery there.
audunw 10y ago
The y-axis doesn't always have to start at 0. Shifting the y-axis CAN be used to manipulate how the data is perceived, but that doesn't mean it ALWAYS should start at 0. In fact, that can sometimes also be very misleading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY
bsbechtel 10y ago
In some of these cases they don't have to. A 2% contraction to the economy would be detrimental, but on a 0 y-axis based graph, that wouldn't seem like much.

What article are you reading? If we are reading the same article then look at the charts under the following subheadings: David Doyle, economist at Macquarie Capital Markets Ltd. Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank AG. Jordan Rochester, foreign-exchange strategist at Nomura. Barnaby Martin, European credit strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Fielding Chen and Tom Orlik, economists at Bloomberg Intelligence. ...haters are going to hate, I suppose.

sesqu 10y ago
What all of those graphs have in common is that they depict datapoints near or below zero, so they necessarily must include the zero. The only exceptions to this rule are Chen and Orlik's graph, for which the data only goes down to 1, yet they decided to start at 0, and Sen's graph, which ranges from 1.8, yet he went all the way down to 1. For comparison, Feroli's data has a strictly positive range, but the graph starts at -5. Martin even went so far as to include two y-axes on the same graph, yet only one of them started at 0.

twblalock 10y ago

> I love how none of these charts use 0 as a base for the y-axis. Lies, damned lies, statistics... Articles written for an informed audience don't need to dumb down their charts by starting at zero. The authors assume the readers have eyes and can see where the charts begin and end. For the specific article in question, the lowest value on the chart is 1.450, and dropping the axis down to zero would not add any useful information; it would just add whitespace. It's a chart with linear axes that is sized to capture the entire range of data. There is no trickery there.

audunw 10y ago

The y-axis doesn't always have to start at 0. Shifting the y-axis CAN be used to manipulate how the data is perceived, but that doesn't mean it ALWAYS should start at 0. In fact, that can sometimes also be very misleading. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VYnFhBKcY

bsbechtel 10y ago

In some of these cases they don't have to. A 2% contraction to the economy would be detrimental, but on a 0 y-axis based graph, that wouldn't seem like much.