Taxes and data visualization

Nadia Hassan writes:

Vox has a graph of tax rates over time.

Their visualizations do convey that tax rates for high earners have declined over time and tax brackets are fewer now, but it seems like there are more appealing and intuitive ways to display that.

I agree. This visualization reminds me a lot of the data visualizations that Antony Unwin criticized in our paper from a few years ago: a lot of effort seems to have gone into making an attractive display (in this case a dynamic visualization) particularly appropriate for this particular configuration of data, without a clear sense of how the graph helps address the questions that might be asked of those data, in this case trends in differential tax rates.

P.S. More here.

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