One is planning to move to another city, the first question in anyone’s mind is the new city going to be more expensive compared to current one. Will my income suffice to the average expenditure which includes housing, utilities, transportation, taxes etc? Recently, when I was looking for datasets and articles for my group project on which city is best place to live, I came across this article: Study says Washington is expensive than New York. The article made me wondering is that really true that Washington is expensive than metro cities such as New York and San Francisco. And most interesting about the article is the visualization used to draw the conclusion.
Here is the visualization:
The above visualization is a simple bar graph that shows average annual expenditures on various household items of selected cities.
Y axis – Selected cities
X axis – Categories of Household items & those are 1. Furnishing & Equipment 2. Housekeeping Supplies 3. Household Operations 4. Utilities 5. Housing
The best part about visualization is that it’s so simple. It shows the expenses of various categories with respect to the cities. For anyone who looks at the graph, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that Yes, Washington is expensive compared to all other major cities. Whichever city that has the biggest bar is the expensive one. But is that actually true? Does this visualization do justice to need or answer to the question i.e. Which is the expensive city to live in? And, I don’t think so.
Firstly, what is expensive? How you define your needs? If the income is high and people can afford to spend, does that make a city expensive? This logic goes with the above visualization. People in Washington have high income and spends major part in housing, but that doesn’t imply that Washington is expensive to live in. And also, above graph just tells us what people are spending on. What people are spending is no way correlated to an expensive city.
Secondly, I think data collected wasn’t enough to answer the need ( Which is the expensive city? ). Having or considering the data of expenditure on various household items can’t only be the determining factor in deciding which city is expensive. The data doesn’t give justification to the claim. It would have been better if the data was collected on following:
1. What is the various taxes of the selected cities?
2. What is the median household income?
3. What is the salary by profession or salary for the common profession?
4. What is the school & education cost?
5. What is the transportation cost?
After collecting data on above factors and many other ones, then it would be better to draw a visualization and draw a conclusion. Better would have been to compare and contrast the data on the above-mentioned factors. Comparing charts on various factors of various cities as shown here : SF versus NY helps in better understanding of which city is expensive.
This visualization made me understood how collecting limited data and how a simple graph could lead to a misleading conclusion. It is very important to define our needs correctly in correct context. Also, collecting enough data from multiple resources is also important. Validating the visualization to the question we want to answer is critical. It’s crucial to determine that have I drew correct visualization or not. Additionally, having evidence to support the claim makes it better visualization.
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