Dashboard – Who’s on the Magic Mountain?
This dashboard published on The Economist gives an overview of the attendance demographics for the World Economic Forum ’13-’14 held at Davos, Switzerland.
First some background on the World Economic Forum :
- Swiss nonprofit foundation based in Geneva
- Annual meeting held in the end of January every year
- Annual meeting brings together leaders in business and politics, journalists and economists for four days to discuss pressing world issues.
- Motto – “Committed to improving the state of the world”.
The Dashboard :
The intent of this dashboard is to convey some key numbers about the attendance at the forum like – male vs female delegates, % of representation of different countries and number of delegates in distinct sectors.
Subjective Dimensions:
– Truthful? Partially.
It is partially truthful. It does represent direct numbers and figures truthfully. I say it is
partially truthful because of lack of key contextual information on one of the charts that the article uses to make a claim at the end. I’ll elaborate more on this later.
– Functional? Adequately.
It conveys information on who is on the titular ‘Magi Mountain’ i.e., at the World Economic Forum.
– Beautiful? Adequately.
This chart and the article were published on The Economist whose readership includes highly educated people many of whom are influential executives and policy-makers. The colors chosen are safe and do not overwhelm the audience.
– Insightful? No.
There is not much insight to regained from this dashboard. Many of the values presented are direct figures and not much analysis has been done on them.
– Enlightening? Not really.
Unless the enlightenment sought to be gained by the audience was that their future financial success depended on become a member of the Forum.
Lets delve deeper into two aspects of the dashboard :
Color Palette – Overall & Highlights :
I like the overall color palette the dashboard has employed in the different charts. The colors neither overwhelm each other nor the reader. That being said the key takeaways from each chart could have been highlighted more effectively if some other color palette was chosen. The author has used a predominantly blue palette with different shades ranging from indigo to cornflower blue which is difficult to interpret in terms of the differences between them when viewing the charts.
Claims: The article states some ‘key takeaways’ like –
“Of the 2,622 hobnobbers invited to this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just 15% are women.”
“The total worth of the 15 richest is around $285 billion.”
“The stock-market value of firms represented is $12 trillion, about one-fifth of the world’s total. And after all the inflated expenses and egos, what has been the fate of the companies that sent delegates at least three times in the past five years? Those 104 firms underperformed both the S&P 500 and MSCI World Index. Time to get back to work.”
I mentioned ‘key takeaway’ in quotes because the third statement is the key focus of the article. And the only way the viewer could possibly gain some information on the claim or to back the claim, from the chart, is to look at spaghetti chart at the lower left corner. The chart does not provide any further information to back such a bold claim that those companies needed to work harder, or as said in the article ‘get back to work’.
Doing some research about the general profile of the companies that attend the forum, I was able to find that most of them are long standing and stable organizations.
This is further evidenced by the fact that the World Economic Forum is invite only and requires a very expensive membership — As of 2011, an annual membership costs $52,000 for an individual member, $263,000 for “Industry Partner” and $527,000 for “Strategic Partner”. An admission fee costs $19,000 per person.[17] In 2014, WEF raised annual fees by 20 percent, making the cost for “Strategic Partner” from SFr500,000 ($523,000) to SFr600,000 ($628,000) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum#Membership
Measuring these organizations’ performance year over year does not make sense because they go back far too long to be able to outperform themselves and instead they present a stable upward trend in performance that is too little to present as much of a performance improvement.
Redesign Examples (for different years, namely 2015 and 2016) : I was able to find a better set of visualizations that visualized the attendance demographic of the World Economic Forum here & here. In both the visualizations, there are no dubious charts and the differences, be it in age/gender/number of delegates by role, are presented clearly to the user.
References :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum#Membership
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21595032-whos-magic-mountain
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35285852
https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/fa5cdafc-d8a3-4c2f-94dc-268723a685fd
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/davos-2016-how-much-does-it-cost-attend-46th-world-economic-forum-1538520
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/21/-sp-davos-guide-world-economic-forum
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/01/daily-chart-15