Does Anyone feel like Bailing

[Undertoad]

The graph means nothing. It is not useful information.

They have chosen to display it as percentage by decade, starting at the first year of the decade, not a useful frame of reference. This has the result of painting the 00s in the worst possible light. Why: because the decade started with a bubble that popped just after the decade began - and ended a year after the popping of another bubble.

Let's say you had a graph like this:



And you decided to measure this section of it:



The green line shows your growth. Great success!



But oh no, you wanted a negative narrative. Not a problem, just use the same distance between the red lines, and measure a different section of the graph:



Zero growth!



Also, they have chosen to graph number of jobs created - generally not the most interesting measure of employment, and useless to measure the state of the economy. For example, before the 50s-60s boom, unemployment numbers were low, jobs created high, but the poverty rates were often around 30%. The Times graph (I assume it's Times by its style) doesn't come close to giving us an accurate narrative on the state of things.