Hacker News Reader

That's not true, but the problem is likely a different than you anticipated; a large region with very few inhabitants is visually more present than a small region with many inhabitants.

So the number of unemployed people can be much larger in the small region than in the big region, contrary to the visual effect that the big region has on the visualisation (even though the employment rate of both regions could be the same).

View on HN

But if you are interested in unemployment rates, and not in the number of unemployed people, it does not matter. For example, both Spain and Italy have higher population density in their North regions, but a map that was somewhat normalized with respect to population density would not be clearer to show the fact that unemployment rates are much higher in Sevilla than San Sebastian, or in Lecce than in Milan.

Of course, if you assume that you can derive the number of unemployed people using an average population density (ie. that the size of the regions is proportional to population), the map will not work. But in that case the problem would not be the map but a wrong assumption.

A map is not a histogram.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com