Krugman, Taylor, and Maclaurin

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] In this morning’s blog/newsletter,1 Paul Krugman included a couple of unusual graphs that I want to talk about. It took me a little while—longer than it should have—to figure out what he was doing and why, and I’m still not sure I agree with his plotting choices. Let’s go through them and you can decide for yourselves. The two graphs of interest are made the same way, so we’ll focus on the first one. He introduces it this way: The closest parallel I know to the Hormuz crisis is the oil shock that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War. (The 1979 Iran crisis was more complex, involving a lot of speculative price changes.) World oil supply fell only moderately after 1973, but it had been on a rapidly rising trend until then, so there was a large shortfall relative to that trend. In the chart below I show the natural log of world oil consumption with 1965…