This is an interesting infographic that I found on Financial Infographics.

I think this graphic is a good example of a couple common problems:

• There is no evidence presented that the war has anything to do with the change in wages. The wage variations could be caused by inflation, changes in minimum wages, the stock market, or a host of other things. In 2003, Bush unveiled his economic stimulus plan, centered around tax cuts. iTunes, camera phones, Cialis and FluMist all emerged in 2003. Just because the war started in 2003, it does not prove causality to all other things. By the way, at 4AM PT, July 16, 2003, Amanda and Dave became the first couple in the American editions of “Big Brother” to publicly engage in sex on the program. Perhaps that caused the wage changes.




• 3D Bar Charts make the eye do some difficult gymnastics.  To the right is a cut-out of one of the bars.  The value for this measure is probably 1100.  Your eye is supposed to imagine a flat plane sitting on top of the bar that extends back to the rear grid line (see orange arrows), moves to the left and then follows the diagonal side grid lines to the value.  That said, if you look at the back of the bar (red line), you see that in 2D the value sits above the 1100 value.  If you look at the front of the bar (green line), it sits below the 1100 value.  Where the top ellipse bulges in the center (orange dotted line), the value sits halfway in between.  Precision may not matter, but if you use rectangles for the bar in two dimensions, you avoid the problem completely.




• I have trouble relating to the unit of weekly wages. I would think that either annual or monthly wages would track closer to how people think about their personal finances.




• Whenever money is presented over a period of years, it is useful to adjust for inflation so that you get a sense of spending power.




• Lastly, to my eye it looks like all of the wages remain relatively flat if not increasing. Is the point of the graph that a war has increased our wages? Since almost all of the wages in the visualization are increasing (except men in 2005-2006 in Managerial and Professional Occupations – I wonder what happened there – it seems an anomaly), it might not be useful to ask the question, “Has This War Affected Your Paycheck?” Assuming the war is responsible for the changes in the data, the data seems to strongly suggest a highly common answer across the board.

I think the more remarkable piece of information in this data is that women seem to remain paid less than men in each category of work – surprising and disappointing. If the wages are inflation adjusted, wages are either flat or declining.

Sigh, I feel badly only writing about the things that could be improved in this graphic. The visualization is well laid out. I like the silhouette illustrations that do not distract from the data. To tell the truth, they helped me understand what the job categories were about. I like that all of the graphs are on the same scale. The color use is nice and non-distracting. I’m sure there are other good things.

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