It's interesting to see the y-axis scaling example, because the author uses it to sell as incomplete a truth as the document he's criticizing. > displaying the

It's interesting to see the y-axis scaling example, because the author uses it to sell as incomplete a truth as the document he's criticizing. > displaying the data with a zero-baseline y-axis tells a more accurate picture, where interest rates are staying static. This is not true of all data, or even interest rates. Who's to say that a 0.01 increase in interest rate doesn't translate to large differences in money? If this is true (and it depends a lot on the intended audience for the chart), then representing it with a zero baseline is far more deceptive and the "bad" chart does a better job showing that the small increases are in fact getting steadily bigger. The problem is that data alone is not sufficient to say anything, and the context (in this case, noise in interest rate changes) is too important to give a single rule for your scale. How you interpret context, of course, depends on what you're selling.