What a terrible chart in The Atlantic! The labels make no sense: why put the numbers in the chart, rather than the country names? The numbers mean nothing to most people, so why even bother? Or at least not make them the main feature, the countries are clearly more interesting.
The choice of colors is also bad. China and “Other” look the same, it’s not at all clear which is which. You can tell from the order in the legend, but it takes some work.
A much better choice would have been to label the slices with the countries, then the poor choice of color would have been much less of an issue. The “Other” category is a good idea to reduce the number of slices, but when “Other” is the largest slice, that should tell the chart maker something. A different chart (bar chart, sorted by amount) would have worked better and provided the information in a more useful way.
Reblogged from theatlantic|309 notes