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It's a pretty graph, but oh do I ever wish it was just a bar chart or something. Comparing areas accurately is difficult. For instance, comparing the Chinese g
by tel 17y ago
It's a pretty graph, but oh do I ever wish it was just a bar chart or something. Comparing areas accurately is difficult.
For instance, comparing the Chinese gov't stimulus package versus the New Deal. The two squares look just about equivalent despite one being a full 14% larger. Other methods of comparison could make that pretty clear.
- kragen 17y ago14% larger is just about equivalent. It's certainly within the error bars on the inflation numbers. (Consider the price of a megabyte of memory in 1940 versus today, or free-range beef, or ivory, or Viagra, or insulin.) A bar chart would make it hard to compare things more than an order of magnitude apart, and a logarithmic scale would make it impossible to show relations "A as a part of B".
- tel 17y agoMaybe in this case, but since he's not showing the error bars nobody really knows. The question of whether 14% difference is significant isn't even something you are able to cogently discuss within the bounds of this infographic. Multiple comparisons across bar charts could cover the same points of the current chart (you're not really comparing things of greater than an order of magnitude apart with any sort of accuracy), but I'm also not terribly defensive of the bars. There's just nothing all that great about area comparisons of squares, especially when the layout is somewhat arbitrary.
- kragen 17y agoWe know he's trying to correct for inflation, and we know the error bars on inflation numbers over such a long period of time are pretty enormous. How much Xanax would you pay for a house with an uninterrupted view of old-growth redwood forest?