In the end of this page you will find a typical description of a Pie chart one can find in a book on data visualization. But Pie chart is more than that and its name is a ”charactonym”. Because to looks a Pie, especially when it is a 3D Pie Chart subtype. And we hear this name all around. ”I want a piece of the pie" says some shady character in a gangster flick. "He has a finger in every pie” writes a lazy author in an article about another dictator emerging in a third world country. ”Grow the Pie” says the Chicago school of economics and is in support of a market economy and private property.
Pie chart presented in this sample has a lot to do with a cleverly titled article in ”Forbes”: ”When It Comes to Wealth Creation, There Is No Pie”, written by the members at the Ayn Rand Center, Yaron Brook and Don Watkins. Article explore misuse of a pie metaphor that shows up a lot in debates over income inequality.
Here is a taste of quotes from this article:
- “No matter how you slice it, when it comes to income and wealth in America the rich get most of the pie and the rest get the leftovers”
- “The people who are in the top 1% today earn a larger share of the income pie than the people who were in the top 1% 25 years ago"
- “The pie is not constant. So your well-being can grow even when your share of the pie falls if the pie is getting sufficiently larger”
Pie chart in a sample is just about that: global wealth distribution shown as a pie. You should also check out the picture of Wealth Distribution shown as Pyramid Chart which gives another way to look at the same data.
When the data can be arranged in a single row and displayed as a percentage of a whole Pie Charts is one of the first choices. Pie charts are circular statistical graphic; they’ve got an only axis, and there can be no more than one series in a chart, the arc length of each slice (and consequently its central angle and area), is proportional to the quantity it represents. There can be no negative values and one should avoid zero values, as it’s rather hard to show them as a slice of a pie. All categories represent the slices of the whole pie; it’s highly recommended not to exceed 7 categories in a pie chart.