(click to enlarge)
I have a single and very simple resolution for 2013: make more charts. Simple charts, just to play with the data. Here is the first one. I like scatter plots with a time dimension, even though data points often look like drunken sperm.
When you plot education and wealth in Europe, you always get a chart like this. Rich and educated countries in Q1, the educated but poor Eastern countries in Q2, and Club Med in Q3, with Portugal in a specially low position. You can see the impact of the economic crisis in several countries (I added markers to some of them to make it clearer), while the Eastern countries keep swimming towards a higher GDP per capita.
Ah, by the way, I decided to use a dotted line to denote a break in a series. We often forget these things.
So, how would you improve it?