Yet another off radar plot 2

In the last post, I described my experience reading the radar plot, by Bloomberg Graphics, that compares countries in terms of their citizens' post-retirement lives.

I used a different approach:

Instead of focusing on the actual time points (ages), my chart highlights the variance from the OECD averages.

The chart compares countries along three metrics: total life expectancy (including healthy and unhealthy periods), effective retirement age, and the number of healthy years in retirement, which is the issue of greatest interest.

From the above chart, France and Luxembourg have the same profiles. Their citizens live a year or two above the average life expectancy. They retire about 5 years earlier than average, and enjoy about 5 more years of healthy retirement.

Meanwhile, the life expectancy of Americans is about the same as the average OECD resident. Retirement also occurs around the same age as the OECD average. Nevertheless, Americans end up with fewer years of healthy retirement than the OECD average.

 

 

Comments

[psyoskeptic]

I understand that sometimes you want to select data but sometimes one is required to report everything... somewhere. I'm just wondering if not showing all of the data in your chart sets up a false contrast.

[Kaiser]

PS: I hear you. That was not intentional. I scraped the data off the original chart and they only labeled certain rows, so the rows retained are the ones with country labels.

[Dagonet]

As an idea, I would use a horizontal stacked bar chart, centered at the age of retirement, with work years going left from there, and healthy and unhealthy retirement years right:

(Please don't look to closely at the values - I tried to read them from the graph, but I think it is visible what I mean.)

[Arthur Steinmetz]

The article is paywalled but, in fairness, there are some additional, better, charts in the article. In particular, I like the iso-line which which shows how much of an effect retirement age as on healthy years.