The Monkey Cage: Choices in graphing parallel time series
Earlier this week I posted the following chart:
Economist Andrew Gelman looked at this and explored alternative presentations of the data and here is what he produced:
Then I thought of plotting the incomes over time (all these income values are inflation-adjusted, of course):
I like this one a lot. In particular, it shows that the drop from 2000-2010 is really a drop since 2007. (Although I suppose Cowen would argue that the drop was happening earlier, and it was just that the economy was doing a Wiley E. Coyote, standing in midair and not going into freefall until people realized they had gone off the cliff's edge).
Still, even the time-trends graph does not quite replace the original bar plot, which shows so much drama. My recommended solution is to give the bar plot for the initial impression and follow up immediately with the time-trends graph, which shows the big picture much more clearly.
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