Source of US food subsidy chart?

March 14, 2010 12:14 PM

I'm trying to find a source for this chart. Even if the PCRM is the source of the chart, there's a asterisk without a footnote for the numbers.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz to Law & Government (5 answers total)

This might not be the best answer, but here is a PDF with a little more info from pcrm.org; it has a breakdown of the figures used to create the infographic.
posted by synaesthetichaze at 12:37 PM on March 14, 2010 [1 favorite]

Tineye results. Not a lot there, and the Matthew Yglesias link, the next place to look, isn't working right now.
posted by The Michael The at 1:21 PM on March 14, 2010

Best answer: The original PCRM link is here.

Yglesias (who has moved to CAP, thus the 404d Atlantic blog) attributed the chart via Neil Sinhababu, who apparently received it in e-mail.

Personally, I agree with an Yglesias commenter who points out that this is a bad chart (see Darrell Huff). The percentages in the left pyramid are linear along the height of the pyramid, but in two dimensions, a pyramid gets wider and thus the percentage should be along the outer hypotenuse. For a pyramid with three dimensions, as drawn, it's even more misleading. My BOTE estimate is that the 73% should be drawn close to the halfway height of the pyramid, or lower.
posted by dhartung at 7:22 PM on March 14, 2010

The pyramid on the right also appears to be linear along the height axis, based on the numbers listed.
posted by Nothing at 7:36 PM on March 14, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks, everyone, and I agree about the misleading pyramid.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:24 AM on March 15, 2010