Posted by Jay Livingston
My graphic design talents fall in the leftward tail of the distribution.* So I have great admiration for those who can make data visually accessible, and especially for those who improve on existing visualizations.
Here is a chart The Economist posted showing how people in six different countries allocated their time.
(Click on the graphic for a larger view.)Enter Andrew Gelman. After only a few minutes (well, hours actually), he took the original data, translated the hours from absolute to relative – above or below the mean – and created this chart . . .
(Click on the graphic for a larger view).The full post is here and includes a link to the R code for the chart.
* My students complained in class that my writing on the board was illegible. Montclair students rarely voice their displeasure to the instructor. They may grumble among themselves about their teachers, but that, however much they may grumble among themselves about their teachers,s usually as far as it goes. So when they spoke up in class, I knew things were seriously bad.
** Why Turkey, you may ask. I have no idea, and The Economist isn’t saying.
2 comments:
Thank you for the chart. It is great to see how the presentation changes our understanding of the situation. What I find striking is that there is no correlation between economic situation (or the way that country has handled and was affected by the recent crisis) and the work/leisure ratio. The "lazy" Germans (the laziest of the chart? Or are the Turks even more work-shy? Even now it is more difficult to say) are the strongest economy in Europe, and given US and Japan's condition, perhaps globally.
I noticed the same thing. The overall economic situation right now probably has more to do with how governments responded to the financial-sector collapse and less to do with how much most people work. That's also true for Japan of the last decade or more.
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