I don’t know what we’re supposed to learn from this chart from The Atlantic, but as others have already stated with passion, it’s pretty bad information design. And even without that criticism, almost every conclusion that one would draw from it certainly appears to be simply meaningless or false – at least without some sort of prevarication.
It reminds me of the biggest statistical sin in current economics: using ‘families’ rather than individuals. If someone uses that measure, then everything that follows is false. Families have changed too much. More so than the economy itself. The economy is noise by comparison. Likewise, for such gross categorization as this chart seeks to make use of, economic activity is meaningless without the sizes of the geography and the population. Boundaries are meaningless unless what happens within them is substantially different per person per square mile/km. Perhaps even, limited to per person per acre of arable land. Otherwise all the chart tells you is that big arbitrary geographic areas produce more income than small arbitrary geographic areas. Which tells us precisely nothing that isn’t absurdly obvious. WHAT SHOULD A CHART OF ECONOMIC HISTORY SHOW US? What any such chart would allow us to draw the conclusion that:
Economic history is not complicated. People need:
They need institutional technologies which do not so much require the state as require the state not abuse:
And, they need those institutions that *are* complicated: social aspects we too often ignore, and which appear to require intervention on the part of the state:
A chart that is useful, will be the chart that illustrates that the only value of a state is in creating these institutions (a) thru (h).