December 30, 2017

Wait! I Have a Better Dual Y-Axis Chart.

I blew it! In my post earlier this morning about charts with dual y-axes I picked some miscellaneous data as an illustration. Then I saw a tweet about an article written in October that lays out the relationship between trust in government and murder rates:

The murder rate since World War II has tracked almost perfectly, as criminologist Gary LaFree has observed, with the proportion of Americans who say they “trust the government in Washington to do what is right” most of the time and who believe that most public officials are honest.

How about that. But is it true? Here’s a lovely chart with dual y-axes to provide a quick visual check. Note that I’m plotting murder vs. mistrust in government, since that’s supposed to be the actual driving factor:

It actually fits pretty well until the late-90s, when mistrust started rising again but the murder rate kept going down. (The 9/11 attacks caused a spike downward and improved the fit, but that obviously shouldn’t be taken seriously. The divergence really began around 1998 or so.)

I have no comment on this, since I haven’t read LaFree’s book and really couldn’t judge it anyway. If anything, I might guess that an increase in murder rates is a factor in driving up mistrust in government, but who knows? As with the lead-crime hypothesis, you need a lot more than a single national correlation to make a case for causality.

However, it does show the usefulness of dual y-axes in a real world test. If you put these charts side-by-side, it would be hard to see if they match up. If you charted them on a single axis, the murder rate would look like a flat line down around zero. But with a dual axis you can pretty easily get a quick-and-dirty sense of whether there’s anything there. And if you then do the serious analysis to convince yourself that the correlation is real, the chart is a great visual illustration of your thesis.

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“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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