Information Is Beautiful

It might be nice to give the whole thing a light grey background of gross World product (about $70tn).

That might make it a bit large, though…but making it drill-down-able would be cool anyway, so how’s about a more AJAXy, zoomable version?

Great work, David. This is an excellent tool! But one major shortcoming in the data you site is the figure regarding the size of the “estimated cost of the financial crisis to the U.S. Federal Government.” As the NY Times reports here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/business/economy/21bailout.html, that $7 trillion figure that you cite is actually not a real “cost” but rather a hypothetical projection of what the governments financial obligations might be in a worst-case scenario–basically, what it would be on the hook for, given how it collaterialized its debts, in the event of a financial crisis that would make the Great Depression look like a sneeze. The actually budgeted “cost” is around $2 trillion–and that might be far less, depending on how the economy recovers. So far, the actual funds that have gone out the door are somewhere south of that.

Point being: It’s kind of unfair to compare a theoretical number with actual budget budget numbers.

This chart really gives us insight into where our priorities lie. Thanks for sharing + taking your time out to graph this. Incredible diagram.

The Iraq war year X costs should probably be inside the “Iraq war estimated total” costs. Otherwise you have the same dollars represented twice.

Why not display numbers in correct proportionality? Facebook at $15, for example, clearly occupies more than 1/3 the space of the $46 that Bill Gates occupies.

Why editorialize, and display costs without non-cost repercussions? Expenses are not all fungible; some things *must* be spent; the idea that you could convert the entire world to solar simply doesn’t wash, because there isn’t enough solar energy in most places to furnish sustainable levels of electricity.

There are other problems but you should consider a stricter set of guidelines in preparing your visualization, then it would really be impressive.

Nice idea though…

Brilliant work. As has already been pointed out, there’s obviously a scale issue on a couple of squares (I was interested comparing the tobacco industry to African debt) but it’s a really great piece of work for the most part.

At $465B to feed and educate all children for 5 years doesn’t seem right.

$465B / 2.2B children / 5 years / 365 days/year = 11.5 cents/day.

Great idea, I did some calculations with the ‘feed every child in the world for 5 years’ stat…

and I would like to know where you came up with those numbers.

I like what you are doing, I do wish it was a little more interactive maybe or a little prettier, I’m not sure which one.

Thanks

Bevan

Please, please, PLEASE learn to normalize your data. You are often comparing apples to oranges to the color green. Pretty graphs are nice, but if the fundamental data they are based on is incorrect, erroneous, insufficiently defined as to make comparison within the graph impossible than all you are doing is practicing artful deception. Looking back over the various features charts on this site it seems that this is not a one-off occurrence. Perhaps we should all chip in to send you a copy of “How to Lie with Charts” or similar text?

Whilst the presentation of the numbers if interesting, frankly the basic data is rubbish and highly misleading. Firstly I should add that I’m no supporter of such things as the war in Iraq, but there are fundamental problems with these numbers.

Firstly what we have here is a mish-mash of annual rates of expenditure and total costs. If you are going to compare annual charitable donations of US citizens with the cost of the war in Iraq for heaven’s sake, use the same units. Express both in a cost per year, or over a fixed period.

Similarly there are all sorts of other dubious stats in this. There is the one about $465bn being enough to feed and educate every child on Earth for five years. I’m not quite sure how you define child, but if I do a back of an envelope calculation and take the number of children on Earth as being about 2bn, then that’s a more $46 per year per child to feed and educate them. There is also no inidication of PPP or other adjustments have been done on these numbers. Of course the expenditure on educating and feeding children in the US alone will dwarf that figure of $465bn over 5 years. Now it might well be that the $465bn is the additional expenditure required to bring all children in the world up to minimal levels of education and feeding, but that’s not the impressions given by this chart. What would be more impressive is if you had both in and over a unit of time that allowed for a meaningfuil comparison.

So the treatment of financial stats is sloppy and misleading – making appropriate comparisons is fine, but this one is riddled with misrepresentations and distortions and looks more like propoganda than any serious analysis.

Iraq War 06 and 07 were $100-130B, but the Iraq War total is $3000B. It seems that one of these is not like the others, as 6 years of war at the annual figures would add up to about $1000B.

This diagram is a fantastic conversation starter. It’d be great if footnotes listed specific (!) sources so the conversation can get started by drilling down on the sources of the figures.

I think some of your charts may violate, if you might use the term, some of Ed Tufte’s prescriptions for data clarity. But in this case, I think he would quite like what you’ve done here. The most striking ones, I find, are the comparisons between US and Russian and Chinese defense spending (what is the US buying?), and the difference between WalMart’s revenues and profits, which shows just how thin Walmart’s margins are, and why they must be so huge to generate huge profits. I like this a lot.

I’m wondering about the 300 billion (it seems the numbers are supposed to be in billions right?) given to charity each year by US residents. That seems a little over the top. Just a little, unless there is something I’m missing about the US general citizenry.

You may have seen this:

http://digg.com/d311Sdp

Would obviously require some fact-checking.