They likely did this on purpose, to make the expansion seem much larger than it actually is. A simple bar or line graph would have given a better representation of the growth rate.

And thanks for the link about selling oneself. I have always been on the shy side, self-esteem issues and all. It’s something I’m getting better with, but reading about and being reminded is always nice.

The issue is about comparing square footage. The genesis of the argument stems from available space in houses, but his rug analogy (10 x 10 feet == 100 sf, 20 x 20 ft == 400 sf) works just as well. Yes, the length of the rug has only doubled from the former to the latter….but we don’t only use the linear dimension. The actual, usable, *relevant* issue is how much space the rug takes up on the floor–the square footage–which is four times as much.

Now, I know from small houses. Last house I lived in had less than 700 finished sf of living space. The house I’m in now has about 1400 sf of living space. That’s fully *two times* as much living space—NOT 1.4 (square root of two) times the living space.

The quibble with the NPR graph seems to be that it’s trying to depict the footprint of the house with a representation of the exterior (i.e., a view of the perimeter of the footprint). But I argue that the figure actually *does* accomplish what it set out to do, in a graphic way: convey that current houses embody twice as much of the relevant space (i.e., footprint) as the houses of 50 years ago. Trying to show several teeny weeny floorplans might have been more “formally correct”, but would have been a graphic design nightmare.

We share the weather, too. Unfortunately.