Recently, the Obama administration released a chart, which was intended to convey the impact made on the unemployment front by his administration versus Bush’s. Apparently, there is some discontent with the chart, as some people feel it was designed to “purposely misinform the electorate”.
First of all, there seems to be a common misunderstanding as to what this chart actually represents. The chart is titled “U.S. Job Loss”, which is a half truth. Job Loss is actually just a subset of the data represented in this chart. The reality is, the figures behind this chart actually represent the 1-month net change in employment. A negative net change represents a loss in employment, and a positive net change represents a gain in employment. Since this chart largely depicts negative net change, it’s not wholly misleading to refer to it as a job loss chart, but it’s not 100% accurate either.
Now, the biggest issue with labeling this as a “Job Loss” chart, is that it means the vertical axis would have had to change. In the context of “Job Loss”, a negative figure would actually represent a gain in employment, since a loss is inherently negative. For the chart to be contextually accurate, the y-axis should have been inverted, as a positive value for job loss equals decline in employment. Although, to accurately communicate the true value of the chart, it should have been named like so:
These are pretty unforgivable errors from a data visualization standpoint. However, neither error alters the underlying message here, which is that under the Obama administration, the rate of job loss has decreased. The key observation here is that what we’re really looking at here is the rate of change, cumulative unemployment is a completely different story.
Unfortunately, bar charts aren’t really the best way to show the progression of a rate of change over time. A much clearer picture is illustrated with a line graph.
In this visualization, we can see that the rate of job loss under the Bush administration got progressively higher as time went on. Under Obama, the rate of loss, has decreased and almost leveled out. So, while the cumulative loss is high, the rate at which that cumulative loss is changing has gone from exponential increase, to plateau, and at the current rate of change should actually begin to decline.
My suspicion is that a committee sat down, looked at a “1-Month Net Change in U.S. Employment” chart, and worried about alienating Joe Blow with complexity. As a result, this chart is controversial because in attempting to over-simplify for the general populous, it has been badly/inaccurately implemented. This is unfortunate because the message it’s trying to send is valid, and is an important one.
Long story short, the chart is mislabeled, and isn’t the best way to visualize the net change in employment, but this does not mean the chart is intentionally misleading, or painting a false picture. The core message is true, albeit confusing because of this poor implementation.
3 Comments to “The Controversial Obama Job Loss Visualization”
This is a controversial argument – there is always an upper limit to growth curves, for elephants, for rain forests and for job losses (at least they can’t e.g. exceed 100% and it’s likely they’ll stop much befre that). Also it should be noted that the Obama administration’s macro economists predicted much less job losses by applying the stimulus and now the rate is already higher than they originally predicted absent that stimulus! What is worrying though is that the second leg down is still pending with the variable mortgages resetting the next two years probably precipitating a higher rate of foreclosures and defaults and bank failures than the subprime crisis caused. This might well drive the US into bankruptcy and then even government employees, whose total has for the first time in US history exceeded private sector employment under the new administration, might be “furloughed”. As for such suggestive visualisations: You might want to check out my Visualisation References resource list, aspiring to be the most comprehensive on the net. If you miss anything that I might be able to find for you or if you yourself want to share a resource, please leave a comment.
That makes it a big clearer. I can definitely imagine it being a marketing department wanting the chart to “look” good, rather than representing the actual reality. But this is really bad, if we want to use charts to communicate we shouldn’t distort them for fear of people understanding the wrong thing, that’s just plain lying.
In terms of the “truth” behind the chart, I really wonder. For example, here is the employment in the US, generally declining:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&ctype=l&met_y=employed&hl=en_US&dl=en_US#ctype=l&met_y=employed&fdim_y=seasonality:U&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=state&tdim=true&tstart=1162339200000&tunit=M&tlen=39&hl=en_US&dl=en_US
And here’s the Unemployment, at an all time high!
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z1ebjpgk2654c1_&ctype=l&met_y=unemployed&hl=en_US&dl=en_US#ctype=l&met_y=unemployed&fdim_y=seasonality:U&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=state&tdim=true&tstart=1154390400000&tunit=M&tlen=42&hl=en_US&dl=en_US
I don’t see how those two could cancel each other out and end up at a situation that is getting any better. I’m of course open to changing my mind, and want to change my mind. Obama’s campaigning has been about transparency and accountability, but I just don’t see how this chart is anywhere near accurate.
“And here’s the Unemployment, at an all time high! ”
So how does this mean that the rate of job loss has not significantly dropped since bush? And this is in fact a significant fact..and the chart seems to be accurate in that respect..But we obviously have to have net job gain to lower unemployment..also its not yet at an “all-time” high i believe..lets hope it doesnt get there and look like it probably wont likely largely thanks to the fact that bush is no longer president as the chart shows a hell of a coincidence otherwise