I never read Edward Tufte‘s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information before. (I have a lot of practice but almost no training in visual presentation of data.)
How do you describe the change in one variable between two points in time? Here’s an example of a “slopegraph” of the kind Tufte likes (many examples here). He takes a list of 15 countries’ government receipts as percentage of GDP for 1970 and 1979, and produces this simple graph:
He likes it because all the ink is data (he’s inexplicably invested in the conservation of ink). And he likes how it’s easy to see the change for each country, as well as the two ranked lists for each time point, and those with unusual changes, such as Britain, the only country with a decline. Those are strengths, and this kind of graph is often great. An alternative is a change scatter plot. Here…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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