Poverty Statistics that Make Sense - Welcome to Povertyville and Slumtown

Posted Apr 25, 2008 to Statistical Visualization by Nathan  /  4 responses

Dan Beech represents worldwide poverty in this video, which is actually a 3-dimensional bar chart with some flare:

Welcome to Povertyville, Slumtown, and Low Income city. I'm not sure what to think. Should I laugh? Should I cry? I don't know. What do you think?

In this genre of over-produced graphs, Povertyville reminds me of the real estate roller coaster, a dramatic 3-D time series plot:

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4 responses to "Poverty Statistics that Make Sense - Welcome to Povertyville and Slumtown"
  • Jorge Camoes
    Apr 25, 2008, 6:05 am

    Nathan, you could add Gapminder’s Dollar Street. It’s a similar idea, but much more interesting, Didn’t check but some time ago it was available for download.


  • gappy
    Apr 25, 2008, 5:25 pm

    I think this is not so informative for two reasons. First, it is not clear what the data represent. Are these incomes in dollars as of date x (and exchange rate y)? Nominal or PPP-adjusted (I suspect nominal–differences would be less pronounced with PPP-adjusted data). Second objection: mixing a cardinal datum (#of people in the village) with many qualitative data (a slum at the bottom, a burgeois home) simplifies the information and conveys more the world vision of the chart creator than the message contained in these data.

    Not quite lying with statistics, but almost.


  • andrea
    Apr 26, 2008, 9:11 pm

    laugh, and cry? is that an option?

    if we disregard the truthfulness of the underlying data (as gappy refers to), I sort of appreciate how the distance between Povertyville and un-named-top-level is represented here (but not anything else about the video!).

    it seems quite easy to grasp the difference in socio-economic groups.


  • stacy
    Apr 27, 2008, 5:05 pm

    The roller coaster is pretty cool–I would have liked it if the years were indicated somewhere, but otherwise great.


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