Dual axes: a favorite of tricksters
Jan 27, 2023
Twitter readers directed me to this abomination from the St. Louis Fed (link).
This chart is designed to paint the picture that China is this grave threat because it's been ramping up military expenditure so much so that it exceeded U.S. spending since the 2000s.
Sadly, this is not what the data are suggesting at all! This story is constructed by manipulating the dual axes. Someone has already fixed it. Here's the same data plotted with a single axis:
(There are two set of axis labels but they have the same scale and both start at zero, so there is only one axis.)
Certainly, China has been ramping up military spending. Nevertheless, China's current level of spending is about one-third of America's. Also, imagine the cumulative spending excess over the 30 years shown on the chart.
Note also, the growth line of U.S. military spending in this period is actually similarly steep as China's.
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Apparently, the St. Louis Fed is intent on misleading its readers. Even though on Twitter, they acknowledged people's feedback, they decided not to alter the chart.
If you click through to the article, you'll find the same flawed chart as before so I'm not sure how they "listened". I went to Wayback Machine to check the first version of this page, and I notice no difference.
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If one must make a dual axes chart, it is the responsibility of the chart designer to make it clear to readers that different lines on the chart use different axes. In this case, since the only line that uses the right hand side axis is the U.S. line, which is blue, they should have colored the right hand axis blue. Doing that does not solve the visualization problem; it merely reduces the chance of not noticing the dual axes.
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I have written about dual axes a lot in the past. Here's a McKinsey chart from 2006 that offends.
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