Diverging paths for rich and poor, infographically

Ray Vella (link) asked me to comment on a chart about regional wealth distribution, which I wrote about here. He also asked students in his NYU infographics class to create their own versions.

This effort caught my eye:

This work is creative, and I like the concept of using two staircases to illustrate the diverging fortunes of the two groups. This is worlds away from the original Economist chart.

The infographic does have a serious problem. In one of my dataviz talks, I talk about three qualifications of work called "data visualization." The first qualification is that the data visualization has to display the data. This is an example of an infographic that is invariant to the data.

Is it possible to salvage the concept? I tried. Here is an idea:

I abandoned the time axis so the data plotted are only for 2015, and the countries are shown horizontally from most to least equal. I'm sure there are ways to do it even better.

Infographics can be done while respecting the data. Ray is one of the designers who appreciate this. And thanks Ray for letting me blog about this.