"There’s a base level of negativity bias that colors our perception of everyone, but that negativity bias is counteracted at the local level by personal experience."
This is my favorite line from the whole article. I try to avoid this, but its so cathartic when I feel behind in life to know that someone else might be even further behind, or that I'm still above average. Hence I need to believe that society's average is relatively low. There's a lot of utility around this habit, so it'll be something I have to be aware of to break.
To me, the GDP graph is the single most important. I also really enjoyed creating this graph illustrating the improvement in the thermal efficiency of engines over time: https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-engines-of-progress
I hate that GDP graph because it is meaningless. If you made the vertical axis logarithmic it would actually tell you something and if you added a per capital GDP figure on a second log vertical axis it would be richly informative. But I almost never see it that way.
People don't experience material wealth logarithmically though. The fact that the linear graph doesn't tell us anything about the historical period highlights just how monumental the last 200 years have been. The graph is the same when looking at GDP per capita. Logarithmically isn't the way to look at the per capita graph either. Log scale would give us a better idea of the fluctuations of the past, but linear scale gives us the right impression of the magnitude of the change, which is by far the most important takeaway.
"There’s a base level of negativity bias that colors our perception of everyone, but that negativity bias is counteracted at the local level by personal experience."
This is my favorite line from the whole article. I try to avoid this, but its so cathartic when I feel behind in life to know that someone else might be even further behind, or that I'm still above average. Hence I need to believe that society's average is relatively low. There's a lot of utility around this habit, so it'll be something I have to be aware of to break.
To me, the GDP graph is the single most important. I also really enjoyed creating this graph illustrating the improvement in the thermal efficiency of engines over time: https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-engines-of-progress
I hate that GDP graph because it is meaningless. If you made the vertical axis logarithmic it would actually tell you something and if you added a per capital GDP figure on a second log vertical axis it would be richly informative. But I almost never see it that way.
People don't experience material wealth logarithmically though. The fact that the linear graph doesn't tell us anything about the historical period highlights just how monumental the last 200 years have been. The graph is the same when looking at GDP per capita. Logarithmically isn't the way to look at the per capita graph either. Log scale would give us a better idea of the fluctuations of the past, but linear scale gives us the right impression of the magnitude of the change, which is by far the most important takeaway.
Logarithmic graphs are almost always horribly misleading. I would love to see an example where this is not the case.