2010-12-09

Chart manipulation: how to make 99 appears 6 time larger than 663

The Economist is very good in manipulating charts. In the past, it would make 120 appears twice as large as 110 by plotting the y-intercept at 100.

Here is another innovation to mislead our readers.

1 comment:

arkhangelsk said...

Be that as it may, China has already risen to the the 2nd military spender in the world, and its difference w/ the 1st (the US) is less than it looks if one considers the fact that everything is cheaper in China (or Russia, where it buys everything military it can't make yet).

While the US is still hypocritical to criticize anyone for its military buildup, from the viewpoint of nearly any other nation in the world, China's rise is astoundingly fast, and quite worryingly offensive.

I guess this was how people felt when the Soviet Navy underwent its buildup, and in many ways the Soviet Armed Forces was actually more defensive than the PLA seems to be striving to be.