General Question

sunssi's avatar

What's the best way to visually show social mobility over time?

Asked by sunssi (120points) April 9th, 2011

So imagine you have a graph showing the distribution of wealth and you collect this data over many years giving you multiple graphs of the distribution of wealth and you know who have changed from being rich to poor and visa versa.
What’s the best way to visually show how many people have changed their income compared to how much they used to make?

So imagine we collected the data only from people making 40,000 in 1980 and we followed how much they made until the year 2000 and me made a graph in 2000 showing how much they all make now, but I want something to show this for all incomes over time.

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4 Answers

FluffyChicken's avatar

I would think a line graph, with a different colored line for how each bracket started out, would effectively show that information.

talljasperman's avatar

A survey would be more effective…seeing that social status/class is subjective or difficult to define objectively. Your way could be represented many ways by a bar graph… You would have to focus and define what information is viewed…Or you could use a three dimensional or more graph. A graph that can be viewed by multiple dimensions would be interactive and very complicated… You can even make a stand inside model… Or a computer model in where you pick one fixed variable at a time and changed time or wealth or some other variable. I would like to see that.

flutherother's avatar

A graph showing the distribution of wealth at a moment in time would be a two dimensional graph. To show how this distribution changes over time would require another dimension and might look something like this

Kardamom's avatar

You could have a regular line graph moving from left to right and going upwards. But then, instead of just showing blips on the graph, you could have a little graphic that is a group of people. And the group of people would get bigger or smaller (it doesn’t have to be the exact amount of people, just an interesting graphic of a group of people that you can draw yourself or get from a free clip art site).

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