Tools:

Rstudio

Sources:

Democracy Score = Liberal Democracy Index from 'Varieties of Democracy Institute'.

Equality score = Gini Index before tax from 'Our World in Data'.

Good job France I guess. No wonder the rich want to flee out of it.

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Interesting, US first lost economic equality before losing in democracy.

Gosh this is really interesting. I would love to see somewhere like Norway on here too (high tax burden, but strong welfare/education etc).

It may sound semantic, but the US didn't "lose economic equality" as much as it "gained economic inequality". The Reagan era introduced tax loopholes, an ideology of tax cuts for the rich, etc etc, that activated a new phase of wealth/income inequality in the States.

Cool to see the change of two unrelated variables I guess.

> an ideology of tax cuts for the rich...

...which they justified by saying wealth would "trickle down" - which has been conclusively debunked.

The degree to which they are unrelated is surprising and interesting to me.

I would have expected them to be very tightly correlated. This makes me think that it's possible income inequality arguments are a red herring with regards to quality of democratic governance.

That’s not totally true. As the U.S. transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a service economy it saw a deep decline in union density and a loss of blue collar middle class jobs that were replaced by a smaller number of higher earning white collar professional jobs along with lower earning service industry jobs, thus exacerbating inequality.

It would trickle if money wasn't overprinted to make it worth less in order to justify the massive debt. Debt that in all reality will never be paid off just moved around till eventual collapse. Shit rolls downhill, and we the people are at the bottom of the hill.

So there seems to be a trend toward greater democracy and less economic equality, BUT with a sharp deep in democracy the last few years

It's good info but trying to read this gave me a headache

This is not beautiful data

Sorry but this is headache inducing. Too many variables trying to be presented here as well as text labels. Also the direction of each "line" is all over the place and doesn't clearly indicate a sequence.

The content is lost because of its "busyness"

It takes a lot of striking and menacing your government just to maintain it

This is why I don't know why people can just self post to this sub. You can't just decide that your data is beautiful. This sub should be about other data found in other subs, and this place becomes essentially a best of.

I think if you made two charts, one being equality vs. time and the other democracy vs time it would be more understandable

What's with this graph?? It's a really interesting subject, but not the easiest to compare data points.

I would think when people are employed, fed and housed they have way less anger. Once basic needs become more difficult they need someone to blame which is what we are seeing now. Prosperity supports democracy.

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Jesus christ that drop in the US

I knew it was bad but, God damn

Agreed with Reagan era introducing tax laws/regs that helped the rich, but the whole “US didn’t ‘lose economic equality’ as much as it “gained economic inequality’” literally mean the same thing. Becoming less equitable is the same as becoming more inequitable. There’s no possible way by definition for something to become less equitable and less inequitable simultaneously.

outsourcing helped to raise the live standars of poorer countries however the costs were borne by the working and middle clases at home while the benefits and cost savings were reaped by the higher classes as higher monetary profit instead of being proportionally distributed

The benefits generated by higher efficiences, lower costs, lower taxation and removal of trade barriers had largely helped to increase corporative profit while at home middle and lower clases salaries didn't grow at the same level and upwards social mobility stiffened due to lost of opportunities and the increase of the cost of education housing and heathcare

If your goal is just better content, rather than requiring cross-posts, likely more helpful could be instructions to viewers and creators on topics like:

• Please upvote data presented beautifully, and downvote anything not that (duh)
• Are there ways to make this data easier to quickly understand
• Principles of data visualization

I'm not an expert in this chart type, but perhaps using hue, saturation, or lightness changes over time could help? Or arrows? Or changing circle or line size? (Edit: to be clear, I am not op.)

I think the most unintuitive thing is how you're representing year. Time is always from left to right. Just look at how scrambled the Canada data is.

I think if you want to keep chart type, it'd have to be either animation or way fewer points. Alternatively, you could have plot the ratio of Democracy Score / Equality Score vs time. I guess it's hard to say what would work theoretically; making charts is definitely an art and your effort is commendable.

Interesting data, but not beautiful data

Is the Democracy score really data? It's just a presentation of scores made up by an advocacy group.

The "economic equality" measure is presented as something where a higher score is better, but I don't think that is true. A country where everyone had the exact same income no matter how they behave, how useful their skills are to society, or how hard they work would be a terrible place, in my opinion. Nobody would do a damn thing and so the "equal" income would be zero.

It's a pretty important distinction actually. It's not the same thing. One involves people getting poorer, the other involves them getting wealthier. It's not zero sum.

Don’t conflate equality with specific classes. Equality is relative to all classes, not one. “Gaining inequality” could mean the wealthy becoming wealthier, the poorer becoming poorer, or a mix of the two. You are assigning inequality solely to the working class, which is stupid because the “inequality” part is the working class relative to the wealthy. What about if the working class became even more better off than the poor? Would you say the working class “gained equality”? No, you’d say “it is less equitable”.

Mate, I'm speaking about the real world consequences of the inequality. I'm not conflating it with any specific class.

Middle class people being pushed into poverty, versus wealthy people tripling their salaries, both increase inequality. One is a massive problem, the other, not nearly as much.

You are conflating it with a specific class. You’re practically admitting to it by saying “Middle class people being pushed into poverty, versus wealthy people tripling their salaries, both increase inequality. One is a massive problem, the other, not nearly as much.” You even said both increase inequality! So how is that different from decreasing equality? It isn’t different.

I'm not saying it's different in regards to increasing/decreasing equality. You're literally arguing with yourself only. I'm worried for your reading comprehension.

It's different in REAL WORLD APPLICATION. In one scenario, Americans on average are becoming poorer. In the other, they are getting wealthier. Done. Not the same. Easy concept. Get it?

Also why not just do G7 at this point? This is basically just G7 - Japan

My reading comprehension? Did you see the original point I was trying to make about the original commenter’s “the US didn’t ‘lose economic equality’ as much as it ‘gained inequality’”? The point I was trying to make is they are the same and you’re going off about “ReAL WorLD APPliCaTIoN”. You’re two scenarios of Americans either becoming poorer or wealthier is independent of “gaining inequality” and “losing equality” being the same thing. In your first scenario (Americans becoming poorer - had to point this out because your reading comprehension is probably lower than that of the average second grader), they gained inequality/losses equality. In your second scenario (Americans gaining wealth), they gained equality/lost inequality.

It's clear the point he was trying to make and you got sucked into a word-debate rather than focus on the topic at hand. You're focussing on such trivial wording and missing the point entirely.

Thanks for helping my writing out. "Losses equality" isn't correct in your comment if you want to be pedantic. Seems your comprehension is also below a second grader.

But no, in both examples, they GAINED inequality. They are less equal. But one is a problem, one isn't. I'm amazed you're struggling this hard with a simple concept.

Lmao, it’s not pedantic. Additionally, you pick up on an extra ‘s’ and try to make fun of my mistake, and you also say “Thanks for helping my writing out”. Pick up a book, go back to school, go outside and touch some grass, maybe talk to another person that you can physically see! Just something other than staying on Reddit, please.

I don't get the point of using Gini index before tax. Given that most western countries have some sort of progressive taxation regime which theoretically decreases income inequality, what does this metric tell us?

everyone hating doesn't know that the only issue is that it isn't three dimensional

I feel like the UK is getting waaay too much credit there.

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Thank you!

The metric tells you about the underlying distribution of income in the country, which is quite useful.

Not too late to reverse it!

This data is slightly complicated, therefore this sub hates it. Please make this a bar graph with the agenda clearly underlined. (/s)

Felicitations, France, I guess.

Although I have to that I live in Germany for the last five years and I don't really feel notice drop in the democracy score. Maybe when the score is so high the changes are more on the legal/electoral level, but for an average person not much changes?