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The second comment on this thread:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2275614130/

puts it all in context.

In short: the graph means what you want it to mean, according to your own background.

In the absence of more information about the graph and how the data was created, yeah. The rest of what she says, though, are mostly bizarre inferences. Based on that, and reading the rest of her profile, I don't think she really cares about science. I have a hard time thinking that people would, as a society, willingly choose to not have clean running water, environmental protection, or sewage treatment plants because it might not be "pious".

The thing to ask now should be to ask is what is the casual relationship, if any, between the two data sets and if there is a way to test the relationship. I think she may also be missing out on the idea of "aggregate" sums.

If you look at the color of the dots, though, you see that richer continents don't overlap; or at least, they seem discrete. That's interesting.

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