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Commentary: Someone elsewhere commented that this needs to be a log scale, and is meaningless if it's not in adjusted dollars.
I disagree. Adjusted dollars or not, anyone can see that this is blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, HOLY FUCK. Sure, the dollar has tanked. But it hasn't tanked THAT much. The dollar's lost maybe half its 1985 value, not 98% of it, which is the sort of depreciation that would be required to bring that vertical spike into scale with the other blips.
As for a log scale? On a graph like this, the only thing a log scale would serve is to hide the data and make it look much, much less significant. Most people do not think in terms of log scales (hell, most people don't understand what a log scale is). If you're releasing log-scaled graphs for the public at large, you're doing it to mislead them and make the spikes look as much smaller as you can get away with.
no subject
If you're releasing log-scaled graphs for the public at large, you're doing it to mislead them and make the spikes look as much smaller as you can get away with.
Log graphs have their place. They're not for making spikes look small, they're for making data look appropriately sized. Measuring growth using a linear graph is deceiving; growth is an inherently exponential process, and the human brain perceives things in a linear context, so using a lin/log graph is appropriate.
In this case, a log graph might be more appropriate if the details of the rest of the graph were important. Adjusting for inflation would be lovely but again, only if you care about the noise in that small line. But this is a graph that shows one single fact, so who cares about the rest. It'd be valid criticism -- if the intent of the graph is to show trends over time. But this is not the intent of the graph.
I dislike people who pretend that you can make a graph that *doesn't* have an agenda. You can make a graph whose agenda you don't know -- scientists do this all the time, and call it 'exploratory research' or 'data mining', and it's very useful -- but all graphs have a story they are telling/highlighting about the data they contain.
...The reason this graph scares me is that this is completely unprecedented territory. Extrapolations from previous data about how to behave, economically, aren't going to work here.
no subject
Yeah, exactly. I've seen graphs like this before, in systems where there is a significant, but finite, amount of internal ability to stabilize itself. The outwardly visible datum looks stable, with only minor corrections and fluctuations, because you can't see the system internally managing itself to keep up with the increasing deterioration. Then the system exhausts its stabilization (or error correction, or damage control) capability, and suddenly everything goes to hell in a handbasket before anyone has time to react, leaving everyone sitting around dazed and wondering WTF just happened.