The chart above comes from an American Prospect essay about Branko Milanovic’s work. It’s pretty self-explanatory as labeled, but the obvious reason it has attracted so much attention is because of the conclusion that the “developed-world middle class” has stagnated in the current globalized economy. Indeed, my Washington Post colleague Matt O’Brien has highlighted this chart as well, suggesting that “this chart is really a Rosetta stone for politics today,” because Trump supporters are those in the developed-world middle class who are suffering from stagnating incomes.

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So Milanovic’s chart is a great stylized fact. But what if it’s not entirely accurate? We don’t know for sure that those at the 80th percentile suffered from globalization or something else. There’s an observable correlation and an implied causation at work. But a lot of other things happened in the world between 1988 and 2008. Does globalization explain that chart?

Caroline Freund at the Peterson Institute for International Economics has a very helpful explainer of this chart, based on research by Adam Corlett at the Resolution Foundation. It turns out that what’s driving this chart isn’t what most wonks think:

The chart shows graphically how the incomes of the world’s poor and the world’s richest people have grown sharply over time, but it also identifies a group caught in the middle where incomes stagnated. This group was mistakenly identified as the low and middle classes of mature economies like the United States. Because global trade and investment also increased in this time frame, globalization became the culprit, harming a large swath of advanced nation workers…. A problem with this interpretation is that there are numerous alternative explanations for the shape. A lot of things happened between 1988 and 2008: For example, the fall of the Soviet Union and the economic stagnation of Japan, driven by its rapidly aging population, caused income in those countries to decline or stagnate, irrespective of globalization. While integration was partly responsible for China’s rise, the shift from a state-run economy to private sector growth mattered enormously.

This chart shows what happens when you look at Milanovic’s chart minus China, Japan and the ex-Soviet countries:

And suddenly, gosh, what do you know, it turns out you have a world that does not look like the stylized fact articulated by a lot of people for the past year.

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None of this is to say that the American middle class has been doing great over the last 20-30 years. But it does suggest that the culprit everyone wants to blame might not be the primary culprit.

There are other dubious stylized facts out there. The New York Times story by Amanda Taub last week about Yascha Mounk’s democratic decay argument is another one. Taub writes that “liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline” and has an eye-popping chart to go along with it. It certainly caught a lot of expert attention:

Sounds terrifying. But as Jeff Guo and Erik Voeten note when they independently looked at the data, the NYT chart is wildly overhyped. It’s based on respondents who, on a scale from 1 to 10 of importance, gave a 10 to living in a democracy. When you consider the respondents who, say, replied with an 8 or a 9, the numbers look far less disconcerting. Voeten concludes: “The article by Mounk and Foa does document some small shifts in opinion on related issues. But these aren’t nearly as dramatic as the New York Times graph suggests. Vast majorities of younger people in the West still attach great importance to living in a democracy.”

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Or, to summarize it in a tweet:

Full disclosure: I have used both of these stylized facts in my course lectures this calendar year. They’re eye-catching, and I had yet to see countervailing evidence. I was just fortunate to note these follow-ups. Many other wonks will not even notice the questioning of these stylized facts.