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Pastimes : Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: c.hinton who wrote (1384)	8/1/2008 7:19:05 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3816

tim,has there ever been a 0 misery rate? NO! And your point is? The US, since there has been a US, has never had a GDP of $0. that doesn't mean that you shouldn't use zero as a base to accurately show the growth of GDP. Using such a base is not about actually having the graph hit the zero, in many cases it never does. The point is to show the percentage increase accurately. If you chop the bottom off of a graph, a relatively small increase can look huge. Lets say some factor you where measuring went from 5000 to 5100. That's a 2% increase. Use zero as your base and you see its a small increase. Use 4900 as your base and it look like the factor doubled. You can also exaggerate changes by how you set up the two axis. Lets say you have a graph set up where the same number of pixels or millimeters equals .05% change in GDP, and 10 years. Growth will look a lot faster, than if you use the same distance to represent 1% change and 1 year. The same growth that looks normal or steady on the later chart will look like an explosion of growth on the former.