Example: Economist graphic
It would be a nice and fun challenge to try to reproduce this graphic from the Economist:

This tutorial does it with ggplot2.
I will try to do this when I have time. I will update on this issue when I get progress.
Thanks for the suggestion. Here's my attempt: http://lpaste.net/491253858190753792 . It's highlighted a few shortcoming/bugs. I'll try to at least fix the bugs over the next few days. It's still missing the labels and the trend line, those are a bit more difficult.

Impressive looking first attempt! I did some tweaks to it: http://sprunge.us/SDUb?hs. I tried to use linebreaks in the lables, but it appeared as rectangle symbols. Is this a bug?

Added trend line. The line is not exactly identical with the original, but it matches the ggplot2 one.
Nice, it's getting there. I've pushed the axis line style bug. I guess Rasterific doesn't support adding newlines in text like that (the text just gets sent directly to the backend). I've come up with something messy in the pgf backend, although the vertical alignment is wrong. http://lpaste.net/2772832299341840384
