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Why not go even further and make the right axis go up to 100,000? Then you wouldn't really even be able to see any decline at all! </sarcasm> But seriously, n
by eridius 10y ago
Why not go even further and make the right axis go up to 100,000? Then you wouldn't really even be able to see any decline at all!
</sarcasm>
But seriously, no, the chart doesn't have to go down to $0 in order to be useful. All you're doing is compressing the data. The original chart makes it very obvious that the manufacturing employment has gone significantly lower than it was back in 1947. Your new chart obscures that, makes it so if I just glance at it, I might come away with the impression that it's close to where it was in 1947, when in fact it's something like 20% lower.
That said, I wouldn't complain if you simply wanted to extend the chart a little downwards, maybe down to $8k or $9k, rather than dropping it to $0.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- untangle 10y agoI don't see how Erik's chart obscures anything. Quite the contrary. And zero-based charts make percentage changes more obvious, not less.
- eridius 10y agoI'm saying it obscures the change between the 1947 and the 2012 values. Zero-based charts make the percentage change between the lowest and highest points more obvious, but that's not really the interesting feature of this chart. The interesting feature is the change from 1947 to 2012, and the zero-based chart makes that harder to see at a glance.
- esrauch 10y agoThe original chart makes it look like manifucturing jobs doubled from 1950 to 1980 and then fell by 90%. Your complaint is that the zero'd axis makes it look like 1950 and 2010 aren't actually that much different seems weird to me, because the actual data seems to be that they aren't that different, and showing that is correct (rather than incorrectly hugely magnifying the differences)