At first glance, this chart makes it look like food stamp usage has gone from almost nothing at some unspecified time in the past, to some huge amount over a span of who-knows-how-long.
Only a fraction of the visitors to the site will click on the chart to see the scale, which reveals that the increase is about 6% of the population over four years.
While it’s certainly worthy debating whether a 6% increase in food stamp usage over four years is alarming, that figure doesn’t grab like the sharply-angled chart, which puts 8.5% and 26M as the lowest measurements, where our brain expects to see a baseline of zero.
Illinois rewarded for misspending only $52 million on food stamps « Watchdog.org.
Post was last modified on 21 Jul 2013 11:05 am
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At one of the conferences I was at, I made a very specific point of mentioning that the chart they were showing us had been rescaled to minimize the visual effect. The plot was graphed on a logarithmic vertical scale - each tick upward was a 10-fold increase in the problem. I caught it as they were talking about the nice straight-line trend they saw...