What’s up with Kazakhstan?

Posted on by

Chris Zorn pointed me to this graph and asked for my thoughts. I replied that I’d seen worse, but the use of two dimensions doesn’t help, and the comparison to the GDP of Kazakhastan is just weird. I mean, who has any idea what is the GDP of Kazakhstan??

Chris replied,

I’m teaching first-year Ph.D. methods on PoliSci this term, and we have a feature called “Graph of the Day,” where — for five minutes or so at the beginning of every class — the students all look at and comment on some graph from a paper, the press, etc. I used this one yesterday, and the response (from people with a grand total of three weeks of graduate education) was identical: “What’s up with Kazakhstan?”, and “Isn’t a reference point supposed to be *non-obscure*?”

5 thoughts on “What’s up with Kazakhstan?”

  1. Just a guess, but they probably wanted to show what 100 boxes looked like, and they then chose the country with closest to $100 bn in GDP.

  2. And what's the *point* of all those boxes? They could have made a much better bar graph in half the space, with far better opportunities to compare the different quantities.

  3. Another problem with this graph is that GDP is a measure of a flow (economic throughput of the country) whereas market value is a measure of a stock (what the company is worth at a single point in time), so even though the intention is to help the reader benchmark the market value numbers to some tangible external reference, in this case it actually confuses the reader (most likely without the reader knowing it). This is a pretty common mistake, driven largely by the ease of looking up GDP data for countries and of looking up market value data for companies. To make the numbers comparable you have to dig into harder-to- get stuff on either the country or company side.

    There's nothing inherently wrong about comparing stocks and flows — "he has more books in his library than I could read in my whole lifetime!" — but you should be explicit about it.

  4. The NYTimes recently had an article attempting to present the same data – with only slightly more success. But here the reference is to the market valuation of the rest of the market which seems more appropriate (and useful).

Comments are closed.