Manufacturing

[drplokta]

Thanks to The Register, here is a nice graph of the decline of manufacturing in the UK since 1945. You'll notice one small problem with the "decline" bit.

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Really? Gosh. You'd better phone the statisticians and tell them that they've overlooked this crucial yet trivial point! ;)

(the Reg forums are full of eejits making this observation as if no-one else had thought of it)

[andrewducker]

Que?

That graph would mean two different things depending on what it shows. If it shows "cost of goods produced at the time" then it's showing a massive decline in manufacturing. If it shows "cost of goods produce, normalised to a standard date" then it shows a decent improvement in manufacturing over time. All I wanted to know is which one I was looking at.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

The *default* assumption to make with datasets like this is that prices are normalised to a base year; the data isn't really any use without this.

[andrewducker]

I don't like making assumptions about data visulations, particularly not with ones that start somewhere like The Register.