Here is the quite famous quote by the former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld:
(...) as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.
Missing from this list were the "unknown knowns", that is, the things we don't know we know. This somewhat portrays, for instance, state bureaucracy, when it asks us for a document it already possesses.
This came to mind following a webinar with Alberto Cairo, an excellent introduction to data visualization (which comes as no surprise) at the European Union’s Data Europa Academy (I wasn’t aware of it, but then again, who can keep track of every EU institution?). The webinar materials can be found here.
At one point, Alberto Cairo notes that vertical text in chart labels should be avoided and gives an example similar to this one. He then presents the common-sense solution: horizontal bars, where the text is also displayed horizontally and everything is much easier to read.
If you go to the Eurostat's X (formerly Twitter) feed, you will see no shortage of charts in this format. In fact, this specific one was published the day after the webinar.
What is interesting, and connects back to the unknown knowns mentioned earlier, is that there is no lack of knowledge at Eurostat regarding suggested practices in data visualization. And one can notice small improvements over the years. There are also complex changes that are difficult to implement in a structure like the EU. However, this specific chart format is not controversial at all. I don’t understand why it still exists, other than due to sheer inertia.
