Billions spent on this. Billions spent on that. What does it all look like? Hopefully The Billion Dollar Gram will help.
This image arose out of a frustration with the reporting of billion dollar amounts in the media. That is, they’re reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context. But they can start to be understood visually and relatively, IMHO.
(This is one of the first images I created for my book. So a lot of the figures are from 2006/07. I’ve also visually cheated slightly here and there to make everything fit)
I hoping this will be a “living image” that I’ll keep updating all the time. So if you find any interesting, juicy or eye-popping billions, please comment below (with a source). Let’s see how high we can make this image!
134 Comments
What about Social Security and Medicare? I’m very surprised you didn’t out those on. Perhaps annual expenditures right now (assuming that you should really be moving this towards an apple-to-apples annual comparison per other comments) and current-dollar-adjusted projected annual spend in 20 years or so by CBO or some other government agency. I would think these would be very large numbers?
Fantastic chart, please update “Worst Case Total Cost Of Financial Crisis” to $23.7 trillion, source:
2009.7.20 US Rescue May Reach $23.7 Trillion, Barofsky Says (Update 3) (Says Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General For The Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)) (bloomberg.com):
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&sid=aZ27ITF7gaoQ
Together, the world’s 47 poorest nations had debt of $488 billion in 2003.
Source: Steger, Manfred. Globlization A Very Short Introduction (2003) Oxford University Press
Two things I’d like to see on this chart:
- Total cost of healthcare (not just drugs)
- Total cost of what we spend on energy in a year, with domestic production and imports broken out separately.
To bad if you shown this picture to someone they wouldn’t have a clue what the heck it is or represents at all.
I take back my last comment. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had to click on the image (picture). I think its nice given the labels on it.
I will post link to this at the Public Intelligence Blog now. Two comments:
1. Medard Gabel was there first (www.bigpicturesmallworld.com).
2. For a visualization, the print is terrible. Need tag cloud words in big print and then smaller stuff. See Medard’s visualizations at his and my web sites.
they say it would take £28billion to run fibre to the home to everyone in the UK.
It think it would be a lot less, cos the telcos already have the ducts, poles and wayleaves. Also paying people to build the infrastructure would take thousands off the dole so it would be virtually ‘free’ labour as they are being paid to do nothing at the moment.
So in reality it could be less than half the predicted cost. bargain.
Especially when you see how many billions went to bail out the thick bankers.
The mess on the Billion Dollar Gram chart is not the work of one person. Yeah I take responsibility for being a part of the problem, I over used my credit card like a lot of people did. One person can not fix it either and if people voted for Obama because they thought that he could press the easy button and talk his way to utobia then they are fools. I voted for Obama because of all the candidates that were running at the time I like him and his logo. I was not under the delusion that he was going to make the whole world full of rainbows and the middle east love us to death, well maybe they want to love us to death.
billion dollar gram!
“I never paid that much for a gram b4. this stuff better be good,man”
Can you please do a version where all inflation is removed? ie. where the 1940 dollar = the 200 dollar. Would be cool to see how the New Deal Recession compares to this one.
So far this year (2009), $263 million (or more than $1 million a day) has been shelled out just for lobbying health-related issues, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indus.php?lname=H&year=2009
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Spending eye-popping sums of money, deploying armies of lobbyists, dispatching grass-roots foot soldiers as agents of disruption, the special interests have fought fiercely to derail the White House reform agenda. It’s now apparent that Obama and his advisors, including Rahm Emanuel, underestimated their strength.”
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/17/kroll/
JOhn
why not put a chart in there representing the $65 trillion+ unfunded net present value of all the entitlements in the US, SS and Medicare mostly?
It would swamp these ‘tiny’ amounts….by a factor of at least 5 or 6 times.
Thanks
Frank
There are serious flaws in this presentation.
It’s a great idea to visualize figures this way, but:
- There are obvious errors of scale, which cast doubt on the entire presentation.
- Two figures ($465b to feed and educate every child on earth for five years, and $54b to feed every child in the world for one year) are gross underestimations.
Simple maths can tell you that these figures don’t make sense. There are about 2 billion children in the world (http://www.unicef.org/sowc05/english/poverty.html). The above figures suggest that you only need about 12 cents per day to feed AND educate a child! This is very misleading.
They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery. From this week’s HK magazine in Hong Kong: http://www.hk-magazine.com/sites/default/files/image/802/802feature1ci.jpg
hahahaha
This is neat – but where is the present Social Security liability? What about universal healthcare?
I love your Billion Dollar Gram. I wonder if I could prompt you to update it a little: I got the following figures from http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/pdf/summary.pdf, which is the OMB’s summary of the US Budget. All figures 2009, billions:
Defense: 726
Social Security: 675
Medicare: 425
Medicaid: 262
It would also be neat to see (although I don’t know where to get the information) how much of defense spending goes to soldiers and infantry equipment, and how much to large weapons programs (i.e., straight into the pockets of defense contractors).
You have perhaps missed the Irish bank bailout – €54 billion:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0916/banks.html
Your representation is nothing short of brilliant. It should be plastered on the side of a huge building so everyone could see so clearly how out of whack the the world’s priorities are. Genius!
A nice piece of infographics, David! Obviously you are “painting with a big brush” in harnessing data and creating this compelling illustration… as one indeed needs to in order to get salient points across in today’s info-overload. Congratulations, and keep up the good work!
I like it. Can you add the US, EU, China, RF GNPs and the world GNP so that this information ins in context of how much money is available to spread over these things?
Can you do the graph with US and World GDP?
I really WANT to like this website, because I agree that information is beautiful. But misinformation is bad. Small errors or even “cheats” are forgivable, but this graph displays countless GROSS errors. Many have already been pointed out (I’ll chime in and say that the figure for feeding and educating the world’s children would not even cover the children of the US). I’m probably most disturbed by the internal inconsistencies. To add one more to the list: just above the “worst case for financial crisis” is “Internet Porn Industry: $97″. compare that to “Beijing Olympics: $41″. The boxes are almost the same size! $97 is well over twice as much as $41!!
I really like the mission of this site, but the execution is so bad that I have to wonder if it’s worse than not having such a site at all. Please be more careful, site your sources (don’t have to be part of the graph, just somewhere we they can be fact-checked), and remember that distortions to suit your own beliefs are just as bad as distortions by other people to support their beliefs.
@davidernst thanks for your comments. I hope you CAN like this website.
re: errors. this image uses *reported figures*. They’re not my figures. It’s a representation of billion dollars as reported in the media.
re: sizes. yup $97 billion is nearly twice the size of $41. But the square root of $97 (used to size the boxes proportionally) is only 30% bigger (6.4 vs 9.8)
re: sources: the sources are clearly cited at the bottom of the post. They’re in a Google Doc here for you to check
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmCeWwNKr6FmdEhUMkhOLTdqMjducDFkT05qVzRqSkE&hl=en
Was this adjusted for inflation?
I’ll echo a few others:
1) It is a great concept for visualization. I love it.
2) Getting scale right is imporant in a diagram such as this; you really shouldn’t cheat.
3) Data subsets should really be shown that way, otherwise it leads one to summing up amounts that shouldn’t be summed. Example: Iraq War costs.
Paul
I see the “Bribes received by Russian Officials” box but I don’t see a “Bribes received by U.S. Officials” box. :-) That would be an interesting statistic, if available.
Supreme… make more please!
How about an inset for total US Federal Income taxes? That would give a compare to how much is wasted. Another is Drug Company Advertising. It is almost as big as what you have for Advertising, so I know that is off a bit.Nothing on here is out of scale by orders of magnitude, so most correction that need to be made are within the acceptable limits of something of this nature. Thanks,
That 15 billion dollar valuation on Facebook was based only on Microsoft’s investment in them versus the amount of ownership they got. I don’t think anyone really believes that an unprofitable company with no revenue stream or chance at profits in the near term is worth that much.
Unfortunately this visualization doesn’t compare expenditures over the same periods of time, and thereby fails to illuminate them. (Worse, it creates even more confusion.) E.g., the chart puts the U.S. defense budget at $440B, but that’s per year, while the total projected costs of the Iraq War or the Financial Crisis span multiple years or decades. I understand the author simply wants to help people understand billions both visually and relatively, but this chart is now being shared on the Internet as grist for the proverbial mill when it’s actually worse than useless. Normalize the data to the same time periods, and then overlay the U.S. Annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is just over $14,000B ($14 trillion), and maybe this visualization will start to make some sense.
Wonderful presentation of proportioning of funding.
Is there a way we can view details in area of FEEDING and EDUCATING the CHILDREN?
Superb! can you show me just how big a billion is?
Under US Defence Budget are boxes for Russia and China, which would be subcategories under the conventions of the rest of the diagram, but which in this case are those countries’ national defense budgets. They should thus be drawn outside the US box.
Lot of misleading information. Esp with the blown up size of the cost of recession. Even the link you point out (from CNN) shows 2.8 trillion as investment not expendifure and there is a significant difference in the two words and for the right reasons. For example, explain to the various governments that by buying US govt. bonds they are not investing in the US but basically expending there dollars.
For the right perspective, we should include the GDP of US as well as show total govt expenditure by various categories (social security, medicare, defence, regulatory costs etc), and differentiate investments from expenses (even a high school kid can tell you the differences).
In its current form, this graph is just plain misleading.
@David
re: “re: sizes. yup $97 billion is nearly twice the size of $41. But the square root of $97 (used to size the boxes proportionally) is only 30% bigger (6.4 vs 9.8)”
Notwithstanding the fact that, to represent accurately the dollar amounts by 2d area, anything twice as expensive as another should obviously have twice the box area (or at least close), your have errors in the math: if you are going by square roots, then BOTH sides of each box need to be increased, i.e. the 97 billion box should be roughly 50% (9.8 is roughly 150% of 6.4, not 130%, that is another error that compounds the sizing trouble) taller AND 50% wider than the 41 billion box, not just 50% taller, to accurately size the boxes “proportionally.”
And, not to beat a dead horse’s skeleton, but the “feed and educate” number is based on badly biased source and data, clearly. Tracing the source, we see the World Bank very likely used the absolute lowest cost anywhere to “feed” and “educate” a child and applied this to all children, when we know that to feed and educate a child in industrialized nations is much more costly (and overall more successful in both respects) than in, say, Bangladesh or Somalia.
Nice representation, but accuracy truly matters in this because the relational sizes is the main point of the thing. Otherwise, might as well draw a lifesize ant and call it the defense budget and draw a lifesize whale as the Iraq War cost.
This is beautiful and amazing. Enlightening and challenging. Well done, well done!
i’d like to see some more numbers of other wars here, like Afghanistan, nam, Yougoslavia and WWII
Also some private spent numbers would be interesting, like weapons, MC Donalds…
A real gread graph!
There are a number of items that have been adjusted for inflation. However, since these were government programs a better comparison would be a percentage of GNP.
thanks bud! thanks for a great resource.I think the most interesting state in there which was instrumental in bringing Europe back from imminent economic & social collapse … when you compare it with some of the other figures …it’s jaw dropping to see how much money is being spent with v little result.
this. is. to. hard…. wayyy to hard!!!
May I suggest uploading your dataset to Many Eyes a visualization tool that will allow others to use and manipulate the dataset for their own needs. BTW – Many Eyes is capable of generating the image you created by hand without the scaling errors
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/
How about the billions in unfunded promises made by the US Government for Social Security and Medicare?
I like this visualization a lot. I think here’s a good addition: 60 billion to stop the spread of AIDS http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1118/1?rss=1
Put the Annual cost of the “War on Drugs” on there and the annual cost to house all minor drug-offenders in US Prisons…
The US space program leading to the Apollo moon landing is claimed to have cost about $20 billion in the dollars of the 1960s.
About $2 billion was spent on the Manhattan Project during WW2.
The global armaments industry encourages all the nations to spend a great many billion$, but I’m not sure what the latest figures are
3 Trillion on the Iraq war? Need a bit more information on this, is this the total spent by the US, or includes future cost of rebuilding infrastrcture in Iraq (to what level, to pre-war or to uptopia level?)
Overall the graphs are good, but some data points need to be clearer. Many are unrealistic extratulations, for example the 465 billion to feed and educate all the children is nice, but even if we we would need alot more money to implement it, not to mention you need to get the people to teach and build schools, also you need to supplement the families who would no longer have their children around to do vital work for their families (terrible that they have to do the work, but fact remains that they do, and family fails if the children stop working and start schooling, so that has to be accounted for too.)
As a person who dropped out of Communication Arts for a career in Engineering I thoroughly appreciate and approve of this kind of graphical/technical presentation. I have a question about the scaling of the boxes in the Billion Dollar O Gram, though. It’s reasonable to assume that the area of the boxes is proportional to the dollar value they represent. Upon closer inspection this can’t be true: compare “Facebook” with “Bill Gates” for example. The values differ by a factor of three; the areas by perhaps two. If the boxes aren’t scaled by linear proportion to dollar value, then how are the areas of the boxes determined?
I like the idea, but it’s rubbish because you cheated. And I don’t care how much you cheated. Either I can trust it or I can’t, and I can’t. I’m sorry if your shapes don’t tessellate, but it would be better to use non-rectangles or leave white space than to just throw out the scale and in doing so miss the whole point of your idea.
Also, making one diagram grow organically sounds like a nice idea, but in practice I’m not sure about that either. The huge potential benefit of this is taking values that no-one can get their head around and making them digestible. But now it’s bigger I want to compare Africa’s debt to the US defence budget and I can’t because I have to scroll around. It would be OK on a big sheet of paper, but not on a small screen. I think new thought-provoking diagrams would be better.
On reflection, “rubbish” is a bit strong. Sorry. As I say, I like the idea (and the pretty colours).
A suggestion for a new diagram? I know it’s a bit morbid (and controversial), but for some reason I’ve found it interesting to compare fatalities. For instance we all agree on how horrific 9/11 was, but far more people die on UK roads every year and no-one seems nearly as bothered. A few less die on UK trains though (about 10 (02-04)) although apparently when asked, 67% of drivers thought cars were safest (http://www.railwatch.org.uk/backtrack/rw94/rw094p06.pdf).
I’m confused. The Walmart Profits and the Russian defence budget are about $11. But one is clearly smaller than the other. What gives?