Comments on: How Britain has changed since 1997

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 09:45:12 +0000

Yep, just checked and they didn’t convert the numbers for ‘Public Spending, per cent of GDP’ into real terms. That’s got to make you question the rest of the data.

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 09:18:03 +0000

I think the public spending stats are wrong – i’ll need to check but it doesn’t look like they converted them to real terms.

The inference of the introduction is a little dodgy. It suggests all of the below is the result of government policy. Much of it isn’t.

See here for Labour’s spending record by term: http://www.flickr.com/photos/4.....otostream/

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:46:21 +0000

Which would be????

By: Gerard St. Croix

Gerard St. Croix — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:00:34 +0000

Of course, the most important thing about this visualization is what it doesn’t show. Kudos to the designers for filling it with relative trivia and carefully ignoring the elephant in the room.

By: Simon

Simon — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:07:31 +0000

Nathan,
You’ve done a great job. The visualization works well to portray a lot of data and trends.Spending some time to absorb the data is worth it to see what the charts are saying.
Well done! And really appreciate your visualization news and information.
Best regards,

Simon

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:35:09 +0000

And that huge chair in the middle is way too big for that tiny fat guy.

By: Nathan Yau

Nathan Yau — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:30:08 +0000

No. The circle sizes are wrong. I agree with that. But it’s four full pages of graphics, and there’s much more good than there is bad.

By: Andre Reis

Andre Reis — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:07:42 +0000

That was the first thing I noticed as well. I thought ‘wow Britain is spending 4-6 times more in health’, until I saw the numbers. It’s even worse than your usual ‘double the radius’ fallacy.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:54:57 +0000

I guess we disagree. In the upper left circle chart, the larger one looks to be about four to six times as large (by area) as the smaller one. But the ratio in the data is 110.5:44.5, or about 2.5:1. So the graphical presentation distorts the data considerably, making the ratio seem twice as big as it really is. Similar on the bottom two circle charts – the areas of the circles do not appear to represent the actual ratios in the data faithfully. The different scales are unproblematic from that perspective.

By: Nathan Yau

Nathan Yau — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:45:46 +0000

Not perfect, but still good. To be fair, the circles for obesity and pay do not need to be on the same scale. They’re different units, so it doesn’t matter in this case.