I'm pretty sure both charts mention that they are rates or % change, if one needs a degree to read things carefully to not be mislead, we have bigger problems…
All I'm saying is, if one wants to work 40+ years of their life putting a significant portion of ones increasingly diminishing difference of median income levels (which for those with high expectations for oneself, the difference is a joke anyways in the scheme of things) into 401k/403b/RothIRA's "invested" for them in the thing we call a stock "market", while paying off increasing larger debts for things one does not need to survive or to enjoy life and that's if one is apart of the decreasingly smaller group of those "successful" enough to come out "ahead" in that game, that's ones prerogative, not mine.
No, the graph is very misleading. The first one is not of rates of change, it's % relative to 2007. Which is a really really weird way to graph things.
Yet it clearly stated what it was measuring in the title regardless of if "really weird" or not. If I was reading a graph that measured % moles of two different substances in a solution over a period of time that was adjusted at t=x and mentioned for in the title, sure, some might see that as "really weird", but one will still be able to extract information from it and apply it in a context of a report (as BoA did in theirs and mine in my statement).
But let me not sit here and type away on the internet and think that some graph is going to wipe away the cognitive dissonance of populations…
The graph is misleading because it misleads the reader into believing that college grads and non-college grads made the same real wage in 2007, disguising the fact that there was a substantial gap between their wages at 2007. The fact that both wages fall a similiar percentage relative to 2007 only tells us that the gap between both wage classes remained the same, in effect telling us nothing.
There are entire classes of misleading graphs that are misleading despite being technically, literally, valid.
I'm not attacking your position, just trying to clarify some graphs that are obviously confusing (whether deliberately or not I don't know).
The whole purpose of a graph is that it makes information visually available and easily digestible. If you have to "read it carefully to not be mislead," that is a faulty graphic.
There isn't an agreed upon purpose of a graph, but luckily for us, there is for what a graph is: a diagram showing the relation between variable quantities, typically of two variables, each measured along one of a pair of axes at right angles.[0] I missed the part on "makes information visually available and easily digestible", but considering that you recognized it as a graph means that it did its job and everything else can be stroked upon to infinity, and like I said, we have bigger problems…
I'm not attacking your clarification, just clarifying my original personal anecdote that was dependent on state of the status quo and its direction (rates and % change, respectively).
All I'm saying is, if one wants to work 40+ years of their life putting a significant portion of ones increasingly diminishing difference of median income levels (which for those with high expectations for oneself, the difference is a joke anyways in the scheme of things) into 401k/403b/RothIRA's "invested" for them in the thing we call a stock "market", while paying off increasing larger debts for things one does not need to survive or to enjoy life and that's if one is apart of the decreasingly smaller group of those "successful" enough to come out "ahead" in that game, that's ones prerogative, not mine.