Saturday, December 4, 2010

Actual Fantasy


Here's a vision of the future from Perotcharts:



Here's essentially the same thing, from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation:


Each graph has a vertical line that separates reality from fastasy. On both graphs, on the fantasy side, things are going up. On the reality side, things are flat.

The main difference between the two graphs is the date the dramatic up-sweep starts. But in each case, it seems to start immediately after the year the graph was made.

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Oh. Here's another one.

1 comment:

Jerry said...

In fairness, exponential growth can really look like that. For instance, the current-voltage characteristic of a diode is really an exponential curve. But in practice you "approximate" it as an abrupt transition from "off" to "on" at 0.6 volts or something, and it is a pretty good approximation. (e.g.: something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diode_Modelling_Image10.jpg - more like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diode_Modelling_Image8.png)

With that said, those graphs certainly look pretty suspicious. Clearly there are some false assumptions going into them.