Graph of the week
Brendan Nyhan links to this hilariously bad graph from the Wall Street Journal:
It’s cute how they scale the black line to go right between the red and blue lines, huh? I’m not quite sure how $7.25 can be 39% of something, while $5.15 is 10%, but I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation . . .
Follow the above link for more details. As Brendan notes, the graph says essentially nothing about the relation between minimum wage laws and unemployment (“Any variable that trended in one direction during the current economic downturn will be correlated with the unemployment rate among teens or any other group.”) and he also helpfully graphs the unemployment trends among the general population, which has a similar upward trend.
This is not to say that increases in the minimum wage are necessarily a good idea—that’s not my area of expertise. I’m talkin here about a horrible graph—all the worse, I fear, because of its professionalism. The above graph looks legit—it has many of the visual signifiers of seriousness, looking similar to a newsy graph you might see in the Economist, rather than like a joke graph of the sort identified with USA Today and parodied so well by the Onion.
P.S. I have no problem with the use of a crisp graph to make a political point; see for example here or here.
Comments
Oh shoot! I actually thought this was a nice graph that shows that the minimum wage doesn’t affect teen unemployment, and if anything was made by someone with a “liberal” bias in favor of the minimum wage.
Sure everything is rising, but that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant are the points around the jumps (discontinuities) in the minimum wage. You can easily see that unemployment doesn’t rise immediately following a jump in the minimum wage.
Maybe the time scales are too small — maybe the data is just too noisy, and turnover in jobs too slow, and employer foresight too great, to see unemployment effects on the scale of weeks or months.
But even so, unemployment is flat before the first rise and flat after; it actually jumps up before the second jump, and falls slightly after; and it rises before the third jump, and continues rising after. In other words: doesn’t look like the jumps in the minimum wage do much of anything.
Posted by: Alex F | March 10, 2010 01:17 AM