Not sure that I agree here. I don't know about you, but my understanding of the variety of metrics they used in this article is quite minimal. Instead, it is instructive to just see the relative variation in the past five years or so compared to the 30 before that.

For instance, I have no idea what the metrics in Figs 2 and 3 are exactly, but I can see that the inequality metric in Figure 2 has reduced itself to approximately 1970 levels and that, since 1995, the welfare metric in Figure 3 has increased by (very roughly) twice the standard deviation of the past 30 years' measurements.

Of course scale is important, but it is folly to trot out the same argument every time a graph does not include the origin. Without knowing something about the y-axis variable we cannot make this type of claim.