sleeper_must_awaken

sleeper_must_awaken t1_iuflsfa wrote

This chart is atrocious:

  • Big countries not labeled (China, US)
  • GDP per capita, so why not deaths per capita per year?
  • No correction for demographics (age)
  • The linear regression is incorrect. It is impossible for a continent to have negative deaths). There are no standard error lines around the curve (like so)
  • The chart is too verbose to tell a good story. Remove half of the information, and it improves.
  • It should be the "reported death rate", because we don't know the true death rate.
  • Is this deaths per year? (probably, but implied).

An informational chart would plot:

  • GDP per capita (which is a terrible metric, but hey... you probably read the wikipedia page before publishing a graph, so you know what you're doing)
  • vs. Deaths per capita due to outdoor pollution in a specific age-group (60-70 or sth). This is an unreliable metric, because different countries account for deaths differently. If someone smoked in a polluted area and dies of lung cancer, what would you attribute the death to?
  • Remove the linear regression lines.
  • Remove the bottom 20 percentile of smaller countries.
  • Label only the top 20 percentile of countries or don't label at all.
  • Remove the average lines.
  • Perhaps also remove the size <> population of the scatter plot.
  • Make 5 panels for each continent with a shared GDP axis (like so) if you want to disentangle the information.

But, most importantly, what should be the title of the story you want to tell with this chart?

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