The poker economy?
StatsChat spends a lot of time criticising the Herald and Stuff. That’s because they are readily available, not because they are particularly bad.
For a change, this graph is from the Waikato Business News (you can see the e-book version of the paper here)
So, there’s some measure of a city’s economy where Hamilton is 4/7 of Auckland, Christchurch is 6/7 of Auckland, and where ChCh and Auckland will be stable but Hamilton will increase and Wellington decrease by about the same amount over the next 10 years.
It’s a bit surprising that you can find a measure (other than construction expenditures, perhaps) where Christchurch’s economy is almost as big as Auckland’s. The graph doesn’t say what the measure is, or how big the poker chips are. Neither does the text of the story. The statistics and graphs are attributed to a report “Growing the Hamilton Economy” by Berl Economics, which I can’t find online — but the reader shouldn’t have to do this much work to decode a front-page headline graphic.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I reckon the piles of poker chips represent rankings, rather than being proportionate to a continuous variable. So # poker chips = 8 – rank(GDP). Rather appalling.
10 years ago
That would actually make sense, for sufficiently-small values of ‘sense’
10 years ago
What’s with the coloured arrows? It looks like “economy in 10 years time” is improving Hamilton’s economy right now, and the current economy is pushing down Wellington’s future economy.
10 years ago