Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few
medium.economist.com
medium.economist.com
Now, only if we can get publications like Bloomberg to admit their mistake about "The Big Hack" but off-topic and I digress. I've always enjoyed Economist and its British humor, and this article just adds more credibility.
Regular corporate tax is 22%, whereas anything involving pumping hydrocarbons out of the ground is taxed with an additional 56%, leading to a tax rate of 78%.
In 2018, this led to more than $13B in taxes being paid from oil companies. Joe Q. Public, for comparison, paid $35B or so in income tax.
In my defense, I hardly slept last night courtesy of a three-year-old with the chicken pox, and I hadn't had my morning gallon of coffee when I replied.
“We do not attach ourselves to any political party. Our public agenda is liberal in the classical sense. We have supported free trade ever since our foundation in 1843 when we opposed Britain’s corn laws, which sought to keep the price of grain high by limiting imports. We have continued to advocate bold policies in favour of individual freedoms, such as same-sex marriage and legalisation of drugs, regardless of whether they are politically popular, in the belief that the force of argument will eventually prevail.”
https://www.economist.com/about-the-economist#editorial-phil...
I know people who would call that biased.
Disclosure: I’m a subscriber.
I remember being somewhat shocked to discover that not only do they have a strong bias towards liberalism, but they aren't afraid to talk about it.
They absolutely are biased, but they tell you how and why right up front which is rather refreshing.
Being willing to praise someone you oppose in general when they align with your bias isn't the same as not having bias.
They could have chosen to be honest “The Iraq war is a fantastic opportunity to plunder the wealth of a nation, therefor as Economists we support it”. Instead they got onboard with selling a war based on false premises.
The minimum would have been simply “we are choosing not to cover the Iraq war as we feel it puts us in a position of being intellectually dishonest”. Or they could have taken a bolder stance and questioned things like what it means to declare war on a noun (war on terror) instead of a nation.
Ultimately, considering the number of people that died due to the Iraq war and the ensuing chaos, simply putting “(which this newspaper supported)” in brackets seems like a lame response to me. Instead how about retroactively analyzing what really happened, what mistakes the Economist made and why, and publishing that outside of the paywall?
You're suggesting they knew the premises were false at the time. They very likely did not know that at the time; nor did any of the major media outlets.
Yes, they all, including the Economist, could've given the war much more scrutiny and skepticism from the start, but that's why they're admitting they messed up every time they mention the Iraq war.
You also have to consider the politics and atmosphere at the time: most people in the country (regular citizens, politicians, newspapers, everyone) supported the war and truly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We all already knew he was a brutal despot who had no issue using terrorism and WMDs against civilians in the past to achieve his goals, so it's not like his having WMDs in 2003 would've been the most shocking revelation in the world. It just happened to be untrue.
This is a massive collective mistake, not just something the media screwed up. The media certainly played a big part, and the media definitely needs to be held to higher standards than regular citizens do, but the blame can't be placed solely on their shoulders.
>Instead how about retroactively analyzing what really happened, what mistakes the Economist made and why, and publishing that outside of the paywall?
I agree that's a great idea. I think they should do both (a full retrospective + disclosing they supported the war when they mention it in the future). They could even hyperlink "(which this newspaper supported)" to point to the analysis.
There I have to disagree. Strongly. At the outset of of the Iraq war it was already clear to anyone working in journalism that Reuters and AP Newswire had an unhealthy grip on the news industry. As an outsider it was clear simply by observing that _every_ news source was beating the same drum and pushing the same talking points.
I remember pretty well the build up - my daughter was 1.5 years old and my life at the time was work, changing nappies, and listening to the news. The Economist was one of the last newspapers to chime in on Iraq, and I had hopes they’d at least take a neutral, objective position. Instead they got onboard selling the war, presumably because they were afraid of the consequences of failing to do so - remember Bush declared “you’re either with us or against us”.
The Economist actually played a key role ... basically the final nail in the coffin in bringing the intelligentsia onboard with way where only Germany (Schröder) stood against.
Anyway that’s all in the past. But I won’t be subscribing to the Economist any time soon
It was absurdly obvious.
At an absolute minimum for balanced reporting, they should have clearly reported both the official "WMD" line and the fact that a massive number of people were calling that assessment bullshit from day 1.
Everyone paying even little attention to anything other than US propaganda knew it, among other times, when the US “evidence” was debunked by UN inspectors in the same hearing it was presented. Which the major broadcast media all transmitted live, so if they were watching their own coverage they knew it, too.
> We all already knew he was a brutal despot who had no issue using terrorism and WMDs against civilians in the past to achieve his goals
We (those of us who had been paying any attention, at any rate) also knew that much of the senior national security leadership of the US administration that was pretending to be concerned about that had, in fact, actively, vehemently, and overtly supported those actions at the time, and that their later pretense of concern about his past behavior was as fabricated as their claims about his supposed present behavior.
I think that's a convenient story that sounds great in hindsight, but I don't see evidence that that's what actually happened at the time. Yes, the Chief Inspector tried to dispute some of Powell's claims, but this was not necessarily considered a "debunking".
There was a great deal of confusion, uncertainty, and disagreement, including among the UN inspectors themselves. It wasn't black and white. You can't point to any sort of convincing proof, pre-invasion, that Iraq did not have WMDs.
Of course, one shouldn't have to prove a negative, and one should have very damning proof if they're going to start a war, but the point is that a lot of smart people did think there was a legitimate risk. They were just wrong, and in some cases were misled.
The media should have been much more balanced and cautious with their reporting, for sure, but the suggestion that all the media outlets just intentionally lied to everyone about WMDs is very unrealistic. There certainly may have been lying going on inside the intelligence community and perhaps the executive branch, but that's not the same.
I do think a big takeaway from the Iraq War and some of the Trump stuff is that the mainstream and historically respected media (NYT etc.) are much less trustworthy than we all initially thought. But they're less trustworthy because they're fallible humans who often succumb to biases and overconfidence in their analyses - not because they're deceitful evildoers.
>We (those of us who had been paying any attention, at any rate) also knew that much of the senior national security leadership of the US administration that was pretending to be concerned about that had, in fact, actively, vehemently, and overtly supported those actions at the time
I'm with you there.
The truth is, it is not a confusing visualization. There is no rule that says to remove variables for the sake of reducing a variable count. It is useful to see that health sciences stands apart from other fields, and other points can be seen as a cluster or examined more deeply by the reader. It is actually one of the best plots shown in the entire article.
In effect it is a grouped bar chart, a visualization that many publications shy away from in favor of stacked bars. While that is good for showing a total, it is often a less effective way of visualizing data—it's difficult to compare magnitude of anything but the base bar. That fault can be seen in the stacked bars of the budget surplus example, which still exists for the improved version.
At any rate, I'm glad the Economist is looking to improve their visualizations and isn't afraid to share mistakes.
Also the trade deficit chart is confusing in part because the negative sign isn't obviously a negative sign.
Edit: the last chart is fine. It's maybe not very sexy, and it takes a moment to absorb, but the data is clearly displayed.
> but the original charts make it easier to see the relationship between the two series.
Well, as the article says, if it looks like they're a perfect fit when they definitely aren't, that's probably beyond making something clearer and going into convincing people of something that the chart doesn't really imply.
> the last chart is fine. It's maybe not very sexy, and it takes a moment to absorb, but the data is clearly displayed.
Totally agree on this. It takes a bit to digest, but that's because there's a lot of information imparted.
The weight is roughly a volume measurement while the neck size is a linear one. Also, if the necks were measured in inches, you'd end up at roughly the original chart, even being mindful of the scaling on each axis.
I think the left chart is actually the better one. It does a good job showing the correlation between neck size and weight.
I prefer the revised graph.
so "percent change" is a different dimension in the two data sets, respectively.
What they did was very similar to standardizing data series (normalizing to mean=0 and standard deviation=1). This is a standard tool in scientific data analysis (most published papers use it) and it's taught in statistic and data science classes. It's also a preliminary step in computing most correlation measures.
It does not exagerate relationships, it helps visualizing them.
The second chart removed the standardization and obfuscated the relationship.
Further, it is simply not true that weight is a perfect function of neck size, so you shouldn't make a plot that implies that.
I bet dollars to donuts that's what a stardization would show too, unless I'm missing something. It would show an even more perfect lining up because it would line up the line ends.
Wish I could test it. Wish pandas had a read_image function to get data from line plots like it has read_html.
Below each chart discussion in the article there's a link to the data, which in this case points to: https://infographics.economist.com/databank/Economist_dogs.c....
The real problem is that often, the two timeseries being compared are too simple to demonstrate whether there is a relationship present. If they're both essentially straight lines as in the Butcher's Dog graphs, you may see a spurious relationship.
What you need -- in unscientific terms -- is to see one timeseries do something weird, and the other timeseries reacting to the weird thing in a manner that fits the narrative. Straight lines don't really do that, but often the first difference of two timeseries that look like a straight line will be good enough.
What better explains the origins of the Earth?
A) Evolution.
B) The Bible.
It's unclear whether they literally asked that question, or they asked about origins of life and just had a copyediting mistake in the summary of the results. They ignored my letter about it, though, so I suspect the former :)
So basically, as long as there is any temporal component, it "evolved". But I'd argue that saying it happened doesn't explain how it happened. So the "correct" answer is still B.
We have planetary and solar system dynamics fairly well understood in terms of models and matching that with observational data. So I think an astrophysicist could make the how argument from an evolutionary perspective.
In a pedantic sense, saying that "it evolved" means nothing because everything "evolved" for some suitable non-Darwinian interpretation of what "evolved" means. For example, if you're willing to not assume "Evolution" implies "biological evolution" then why not argue that woman evolved from man's rib as per the Bible and that man "evolved" from dirt?
"Evolution" without explicit context, and perhaps additional qualification (e.g. "the evolution of our solar system") means that as much as it means nothing.
But “better” always involves a subjective quality judgement.
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Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.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 ...
(Thanks for the pic, it was interesting.)
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?
Well, 50% of the population would be richer than the average US citizen rather than 5%.
The GDP per capita in the US is around 60k, that's around the 77th percentile:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
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.
0. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/28/inside-the-...