The Billion Pound o Gram

November 27, 2009

My latest visual piece for The Guardian, The Billion Pound O Gram, is a British cousin of The Billion Dollar Gram. It reveals the scale of the budget deficit in the centre of the British economy. SPOILER: It’s a big one..

Link to the Guardian piece.

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Posted in Data Journalism, Data Visualisation, Economics, Guardian Datablog, InfoVisualisation, Political, Statistics, Visual Journalism.
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9 Comments

  1. Russell Johnston
    Posted November 28, 2009 at 12:42 am | Permalink

    Breathtakingly good. So worthwhile. Now could you do one mixing in the cost per year of obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, smoking, alcohol, drugs… ? Pretty please?

  2. Lee
    Posted November 28, 2009 at 12:51 am | Permalink

    Hi. I didn’t see any box for payments to the EU ?
    UK is a net contributer (unlike a net recipient e.g., Spain), so what is the cost?

    Everyone talks about what we pay to the EU… so what is it?

    Superb graph by the way.

  3. gifts for men
    Posted November 28, 2009 at 9:41 am | Permalink

    It’s time to put them into perspective The billion-pound-o-gram by David McCandless. Click on graphic for bigger image 289 billion spent on this. 400 billion spent on that. When money reaches this level it literally becomes mind- boggling…..

  4. David Leslie
    Posted November 28, 2009 at 5:45 pm | Permalink

    I find this visualisation to be amazingly effective. My immediate focus is on Trident, which is so close to the National Debt – is that per annum ? It is so unfashionable to be in favour of the EU, but now is the time for us to offer Trident to Europe as Europe’s own submarine defence deterrent. I don’t know how we work out the ‘button’ is it all 27 countries that have to ‘fire’, or just the majority, and is that majority by population ? The protocol is horrendous, but the threat is real. If Korea and Iran are capable of sending missiles to Europe, then we need a defence that is real. And Britain can no longer afford that on it’s own, as you so clearly show.

  5. Jason
    Posted November 30, 2009 at 4:20 pm | Permalink

    Notice there is no reference to PFI debt on here (which is generally kept off the balance sheets, so perhaps unsurprising…). Current estimates are that it runs to 215bn more debty goodness.

    http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/07/the-biggest-weirdest-rip-off-yet/

  6. ian
    Posted December 3, 2009 at 5:51 pm | Permalink

    As was pointed out in the comments on the Guardian’s page, some of the data is incorrect and the boxes are not consistently sized. The overall effect is misleading.

    It actually made me quite angry to see such sloppy work published alongside slogans like ‘information is beautiful’ and ‘data is sacred’.

  7. ropes
    Posted December 22, 2009 at 12:54 pm | Permalink

    Interesting diagram – it shows, for instance, that the ‘asset purchase and lending’ aspect of the bank bailout, which accounts less than half of the total cost, cost more than the entire personal wealth of the UK!!! We are truly up the creek.

    Some of the wording is also interesting: personal wealth comes under the category of ‘hoarding’ – a word that has strong pejorative connotations. If, after all that’s happened in the past two years, we still believe that ‘debt = good; savings = hoarding”, then there is no hope for any of us!

  8. maya tutorials
    Posted January 7, 2010 at 9:31 am | Permalink

    Interesting diagram – it shows, for instance, that the ‘asset purchase and lending’ aspect of the bank bailout, which accounts less than half of the total cost, cost more than the entire personal wealth of the UK!!! We are truly up the creek.

  9. reiner
    Posted January 25, 2010 at 2:56 pm | Permalink

    Breathtakingly good.

6 Trackbacks

  1. By Tweets that mention The Billion Pound o Gram | Information Is Beautiful -- Topsy.com on November 27, 2009 at 5:40 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Drew B and David McCandless, Info=Beautiful. Info=Beautiful said: The Billion Pound O Gram http://bit.ly/5cRrXm My latest visual for the Guardian. Warning: SCARY! [...]

  2. By uberVU - social comments on November 27, 2009 at 5:48 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by mccandelish: The Billion Pound O Gram http://bit.ly/5cRrXm My latest visual for the Guardian. Warning: SCARY!…

  3. By TwittLink - Your headlines on Twitter on November 27, 2009 at 6:57 pm

    [...] Tweets about this great post on TwittLink.com [...]

  4. By Infographic eye candy roundup : Lauren Rae Orsini on December 10, 2009 at 6:01 pm

    [...] Infographic to check out first: The Billion Pound O Gram. [...]

  5. By The wait has begun - A Blog Named Dan on December 24, 2009 at 7:21 am

    [...] Information is Beautiful and been inspired by the different types of charts he uses, such a Treemaps or Bubble Charts. These, and some others, should be able to be procedurally generated, though some [...]

  6. By 2012? fin del mundo? « Blog de FREDES on February 10, 2010 at 11:51 pm

    [...] posts » The Billion Pound o GramNovember 27, [...]

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