mickelsp / economistplot

Playing around with different ways of plotting data from a misleading The Economist "Chart of the Day"

EconomistPlot

Playing around with different ways of plotting data from a misleading The Economist "Chart of the Day"

The Economist posted a chart of the day showing the relationship between life satisfaction and income. Based off of this plot, the magazine drew the conclusion that life satisfaction increases linearly with income. However, the chart is quite misleading because it uses a log axis for the income data and a linear axis for the satisfaction data to make it look like a linear relationship.

The Economist is mistaken in its conclusion that, "Moving from rich to richer seems to raise happiness just as much as moving from poor to less poor", and I plotted their data side-by-side in the original log-linear fashion and then in linear-linear fashion to show how misleading it is.

Edited: The Economist is mostly citing the conclusion drawn by the original Brookings Institution research report.

I used GraphClick to digitize the data from the original image, exported to a .csv file, and then plotted using R.