The importance of being careful with visual storytelling about the $410 billion stimulus check.
I’m a data geek. Always have been. A position I had early in my career was an analyst at a casino. It was love-at-first-sql-statement of the how wonderful data is, appropriately gathered, analyzed, synthesized and presented. During my tenure at my first job, I learned and developed the craft of visual story telling with data visualizations in business. It is then fitting my first post here would be about data visualization.
A story just came out in the Wall Street Journal about the Third Covid-19 Stimulus Package. It is wonderful and useful for the WSJ to break this down for the rest of us too busy to read hundreds of pages of the bill.
Half-way down the page there was a nice info-graphic comparing the three different bills. I present exhibit A:
One glance and any Edward Tufte fan would immediately be doing a double take. We are presented with an infographic that is upon first examination using area to imply the relative sizes of the stimulus checks. However, what happened is relative length was calculated, and that length used to draw a square to illustrate relative size. The area of a square grows proportional to the square of the length of one side, not proportionally. The graphic does not appropriately represent the relative sizes of the checks.
Below, is a corrected version that has the area of each square proportional to the check size. The visually drawn comparisons are pretty different. Typically, I wouldn’t care too much about an infographic not being dead accurate; it happens all the time. However in this case, it is probably just a little important that we have the correct perspective on $410 billion dollars.
I present the data.
And here, putting lengths proportional to the bill sizes next to the original graphic, one can clearly see what happened.
