This is a confusing graph from the Economist that I snipped when I saw it in 2013. Very difficult to wrap your head around what is being shown here: https://pasteboard.co/I7ttkG5.png
I actually think that this might be one of those cases where the borders of a graph matter a lot. The way that they styled it here makes it look like a time series, and makes it really difficult to interpret at first sight. I think flipping the axes to make it much akin to a cumulative distribution function would make it easier to read.
I assume you wrapped your head around it by now, but I'll explain it anyway.
Bottom right; barely 5% of the world population is equal or richer than the average US citizen. 20% of the world population has at least 25% of the average US citizen, or 80% of the world has less than than 25% of the average US citizen.
Note that a graph of the US alone would look about the same.
I think its a highly informative graph, that you will not get at a glance. Another mistake they noted in the article:
"Another odd thing is the choice of colour. In an attempt to emulate Labour’s colour scheme, we used three shades of orange/red to distinguish between Jeremy Corbyn, other MPs and parties/groups. We don’t explain this. While the logic behind the colours might be obvious to a lot of readers, it perhaps makes little sense for those less familiar with British politics."
I think it's a bonus if you can make a graph have extra layers of information for the informed reader. In literature this his highly regarded. Why not in data visualization?
> Bottom right; barely 5% of the world population is equal or richer than the average US citizen.
But GDP per capita is not a measure of personal income or wealth, it's a measure of production of a country. Since it not a measure that can be applied to people individually, it seems ambiguous what it means for a given person in the world to be "above a given % of US GDP per person."
US GDP per capita in 2017 is about $60k. What does it mean for an individual in the world to be "above" this? Their personal income in a year? Their total wealth?
My best guess is that this graph considers a person "above" this if they live in a country that has a per capita GDP above $60k (at purchasing-power parity). So really it's a comparison of countries and their per capita GDP, weighted by population.
So I think the bottom right is actually saying "5% of the world population lives in a country that produces more per person than the US." It doesn't say much of anything about how rich individuals are.
The disparity between the (very) rich few and the many poor would result in the share of people above and below the hypothetical "average" person not being 50/50.
Perhaps it would be more clear sticking to a single value of US GDP, e.g. as "% of world pop. above 1/4 of US GDP per person, over time", but the data shown only has three time points ...
If you can show me the specific error, I'd be interested to look into this, since I work on Let's Encrypt, which provided the certificate for that site (and it's useful to know about browser compatibility problems or new potential kinds of misconfiguration).
An error occurred during a connection to pasteboard.co. Peer received a valid certificate, but access was denied. Error code: SSL_ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED_ALERT
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
