A look at how the New York Times readers look at the others

The above chart, when it was unveiled at the end of November last year, got some mileage on my Twitter feed so it got some attention. A reader, Eric N., didn't like it at all, and I think he has a point.

Here are several debatable design decisions.

The chart uses an inverted axis. A tax cut (negative growth) is shown on the right while a tax increase is shown on the left. This type of inversion has gotten others in trouble before, namely, the controversy over the gun deaths chart (link). The green/red color coding is used to signal the polarity although some will argue this is bad for color-blind readers. The annotation below the axis is probably the reason why I wasn't confused in the first place but the other charts further down the page do not repeat the annotation, and that's where the interpretation of -$2,000 as a tax increase is unnatural!

The chart does not aggregate the data. It plots 25,000 households with 25,000 points. Because of the variance of the data, it's hard to judge trends. It's easy enough to see that there are more green dots than red but how many more? 10 percent, 20 percent, 40 percent? It's also hard to answer any specific questions, say, about households with a certain range of incomes. There are various ways to aggregate the data, such as heatmaps, histograms, and so on.

For those used to looking at scientific charts, the x- and y-axes are reversed. By convention, we'd have put the income ranges on the horizontal axis and the tax changes (the "outcome" variable) on the vertical axis.

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The text labels do not describe the data patterns on the chart so much as they offer additional information. To see this, remove the labels as I have done below. Try adding the labels based on what is shown on the chart.

Perhaps it's possible to illustrate those insights with a set of charts.

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While reading this chart, I kept wondering how those 25,000 households were chosen. This is a sample of  households. The methodology is explained in a footnote, which describes the definition of "middle class" but unfortunately, they forgot to tell us how the 25,000 households were chosen from all such middle-class households.

The decision to omit the households with income below $40,000 needs more explanation as it usurps the household-size adjustment. Also, it's not clear that the impact of the tax bill on the households with incomes between $20-40K can be assumed the same as for those above $40K.

Are the 25,000 households is a simple random sample of all "middle class" households or are they chosen in some ways to represent the relative counts? It's also useful to know if they applied the $40K cutoff before or after selecting the 25,000 households. 

Ironically, the media kit of the Times discloses an affluent readership with median household income of almost $190K so it appears that the majority of readers are not represented in the graphic at all!