The compression
curve.

The horizontal axis is year, on a log scale. A point plotted near the left edge happened a long time ago. A point near the right happened recently. Same scale the Compare overlay uses.

The vertical axis is gap. How many years passed between the era a transition left behind and the era it arrived at. A point near the top means thousands of years went by. A point near the bottom means the gap was only a few years, or less.

A line that bends down from upper-left to lower-right is the compression story the whole site is about. The speed of information bends hardest. Money bends fastest in its recent half. Narrative bends steadily. The Mandate bends but has noise in it.

Market crashes, turned on as a fifth line, are included specifically because they do not compress uniformly. The gap between the South Sea Bubble and the Great Depression is longer than the gap between tulips and South Sea. Crashes happen when they happen. That difference, between domains that compress and domains that do not, is one of the more useful things this chart shows.