March 11th, 2009 
Yong-Long Lai Here’s a deceptive looking graph that’s been distributed around the Internet which I feel is doing a big injustice to what is happening in the real world. As you can see the axis is in thousands of jobs loss. The Employment Loss graph is deceptive simply because it’s showing absolute job loss and is intending to measure the impact of these employment losses on the economy. Firstly, we know we know that at different points in time the population is obviously different which would mean that the work force (employable people) is also different. i.e. the best way to measure the effect of the employment loss that’s actually occurred, especially since we want to measure it with previous recessionary period is to look at the percentage employment loss.
Below graph shows the Number of Employment Loss
The below graph shows the Percentage of Employment Loss
As we can see, the current rate of employment loss is just as bad as the 80s recession even though the current employment loss numbers are a lot higher. If you’re wondering why these graphs are so different then you’ll want to know that the population of America in the 80s was around 230 million whereas in 2008 is around 300 million. This means a 3.5million employment loss in the current moment is around 1.16% of the total population and 1.52% of the 80s population. This might look small but it’s actually 30% difference! Anyways, enough of the maths talk…
PS: I haven’t checked the data driving the graphs closely but I trust that these guys actually know how to graph even though I feel that the absolute employment loss graph was trying to be deceptive, even though it is correct. This post is more to show readers that graphs can be misleading even though they are correct. Readers need to understand that percentage graph is usually more useful than absolute graph especially when comparing things. (it’s always more fair and normalise your numbers before you compare them
In short, there no need to get all worried about crazy vertical looking graph, just understand what is the graphs and numbers really mean and don’t be tricked by accurate information presented in deceptive ways.
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