I sat through a conference presentation last month in which an economist spent twelve minutes explaining a chart that had eleven bars, four colours, two axes, and a footnote in font size six.

By minute four, half the room was on their phones.

This is not unusual. Economics conferences are full of charts that are technically correct and practically useless. They communicate to no one except the person who built them.

The problem is not the data. The problem is that most economists treat charts as a record of their analysis, not as a communication tool. Everything that went into the model ends up on the slide. Every robustness check, every subgroup, every interaction term.

But a slide is not a methodology section. It is a sentence. And like any sentence, it should say one thing.

Alberto Cairo, who has written more clearly about data visualisation than almost anyone, puts it this way: the first question you should ask about any chart is not “is this accurate?” but “what does this say?”

Try it. Open your last conference presentation. Pick the most complex slide. Ask yourself: what is the one thing I want the audience to take from this? Then rebuild the slide around that one thing. You might be surprised how much you can cut.