What is Wrong with this Picture?

The graph at right is from the article Obama's Gotta Go by Niall Ferguson in The Daily Beast. I am not sure if The Daily Best published the article to prove it is not just a liberal mouthpiece or to prove that it does not feel any concern about being stupid or if it is some sort of super secret stealth strategy to make conservative pundits actually look like idiots. I suspect it's the latter.



Anyway, you can see by the graph that the growth in US GDP is actually phenomenal, even outpacing the rise of India's, and that's despite the fact that India and China, being substantially less developed, have substantially more ability to grow their GDP.

So what's wrong with the graph? I think it's that in the subtitle it says "America's" when it means to say either "Russia" or the "UK."  Yes, that's probably it.  It is because, well, for one thing "America" is not a nation (making the title "A Nation Losing Ground" nonsensical if it meant "America" as something besides a typo), and more importantly because the graph shows the USA really doing phenomenally not "losing ground"," whatever that's supposed to mean.

James Fallows has a detailed takedown of the entire moronic Niall Ferguson/Daily Beast article at the Atlantic: As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize. Via Tim!

Oooooo ... here's another cool graph (through Fallows, by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic: