Friday, September 8, 2017

Jeff Desjardins — 2,000 Years of Economic History in One Chart


You'll want to read the whole post. It's short. 

Visual Capitalist
2,000 Years of Economic History in One Chart
Jeff Desjardins

4 comments:

MRW said...

I REALLY REALLY REALLY fucking hate the kind of charts shown in the first figure. I get hot under the collar for some reason.

You have no idea whether they are additive or not, and nobody bothers to indicate or clarify it on the chart itself.

For example, if you see green “on top” of blue, say, is that blue + green, or is green “behind” blue?

Blue + green is additive. Scott Fullwiler’s famous Sector Financial Balances chart as a % of GDP is additive.

To see the difference, download this and open in Excel.
http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/SFB%202010Q3.xlsx

Chart 2 is additive.
Chart 1 is not.

Motherfucks.

Tom Hickey said...

That's why I said to read the short post accompanying the chart. It warns about the methodological limitations.

MRW said...

My rant was a general one. Economists do it all the time. I can't tell you the number of time I've called the institution to find out what they are using, and then hurled my toxic complaints before I hung up. Probably why I've had so little effect on getting it changed. I sound like a bonafide kook.

Remember that ad/commercial that concluded, “Dear Park, that’s good water?” It literally drove me nutz to hear that, still does. I had a visceral reaction to it, still have. Off the wall. Off the charts unreasonable. Except now I just hyperventilate and shut up.

We all have our buttons.

Ignacio said...

It's share of world GDP, it has to be additive because GDP can't be more than 100%. Still the graph is pointless without an accompanying GDP per capita graph, but...