Unsurprisingly I didn’t keep up with my extremely intermittent series of Graphs of the Economist. In the meantime, though, I took the trouble to set up an RSS feed that will deliver a dose of Economist graphingdom every. Single. Day. Right to your, erm, RSS feed reader.
Get it here: http://feed43.com/economistdailychart.xml
Who is going to get how many seats in the Israeli general election today? Let’s look at the exit polls, courtesy of Ha’aretz:
Exit poll results... sort of
Wow, the Labor Party and Yisrael Beitenu are doing pretty badly. They are only predicted to gain one quarter of the seats that Likud and Kadima are projected to get! But, wait a second. 15 is one half of 30, not a quarter, right? So how did they get the graph to look like that? The bars match up perfectly with the y-axis; they have interpolated the numbers between 15 and 30 correctly. What’s going on??
Oh. I see. It’s a, *cough*, “non-linear scale”. Got it. And this is the country with one of the highest per-capita levels of PhD holdership in the world. Come on Ha’aretz, wake up!
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Before the curse of statistics fell upon mankind we lived a happy, innocent life, full of merriment and go, and informed by fairly good judgment. We knew when the weather was cold and when it was dry; we knew what public opinion was; we knew what was good for us and what was bad for us, and all the rest. That state of affairs lasted for centuries. It was too good to last. The statistician was let loose. He came in the train of Discovery and the rest. He was part of Progress. He took up his authority in a world which could only count and was ceasing to think or to feel. He appealed to those what had learnt to read figure and to add up and to multiply and to spell, but who had learnt nothing else, who were even rapidly unlearning all things worth knowing.
— Hilaire Belloc, (Anglo-French poet and essayist), “The Silence of the Sea: And Other Essays”, 1940
I have seen the first sentence quoted in many places, but never the passage beyond it, and rarely the correct source, so I have taken it upon myself to rectify the situation. Consider the situation now-rectified.
Trust that leader of ‘papers, The Economist, to supply graphs that get to the heart of a matter faster than a million pundits’ articles (give or take):
All that hogwash about how China will imminently rule us all, presumably just before we all get to live underwater, is just that: a pigbath, a swineshower. Utter nonsense, for those less deft with metaphors amongst you. GDP is not the all-important measure of wealth that many think it is, let alone happiness or power, but even if China did once again reach the world share of it that it had 400 years ago, the consequences would not be as dire for the “West” as they were for China under occupation by that same “West” only a century ago. I smell the rotten whiff of racism emanating from fears of lots of Orientals becoming as wealthy as Europeans, but I can’t find the corpse to prove it.
Chill out.
[I do wonder how the graph-creators decided on what the height of the bars should be, but even with the possibility of substantial errors in estimation, the message seems clear enough].
I always like some of that, so ogle an example of it here:
This is my life.
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