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