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I don't see how Erik's chart obscures anything. Quite the contrary. And zero-based charts make percentage changes more obvious, not less.

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I'm saying it obscures the change between the 1947 and the 2012 values. Zero-based charts make the percentage change between the lowest and highest points more obvious, but that's not really the interesting feature of this chart. The interesting feature is the change from 1947 to 2012, and the zero-based chart makes that harder to see at a glance.

The original chart makes it look like manifucturing jobs doubled from 1950 to 1980 and then fell by 90%.

Your complaint is that the zero'd axis makes it look like 1950 and 2010 aren't actually that much different seems weird to me, because the actual data seems to be that they aren't that different, and showing that is correct (rather than incorrectly hugely magnifying the differences)

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