Lovely and interesting as always :)

Any chance of providing a key to different boxes? A lot of the titles are so terse, it’s difficult to understand what they mean. For example, 21B to “save Amazon” is very sketchy: it’s for a specific project, not all-purpose saving-the-Amazon-from-all-harm; it’s obviously an estimate at best (not necessarily of the cost, but of the funds they hope to be able to raise); and quite frankly, I was wondering for a minute if this was some kind of bail-out figure for Amazon.com…

Similarly – Iraq wars total eventual cost as of now, or a revised estimate of the total until it’s all over? NASA what? Video games revenue or profit? Lift 1B people out of extreme poverty how (I assume the answer is not “give each one 300 dollars”), and what’s “extreme poverty,” and how much higher than “slightly less extreme poverty” are they lifted?

I love the graph, but this version has a lot of pretty confusing labels :-/

How can the GFC have a ‘cost’? In what sense did that money ever exist?

(Of course, I don’t blame IIB, since you’re simply representing what was reported…)

Aloha,
I just wanted to say that I love your work. I think information can be a very tangible, malleable thing, and it’s critical that people have ways to interact with it, especially if it breaks them from their standard channels.

I don’t think I would have written anything here except I want to comment on the second half of the image. We’ve come to learn that by the continued revaluing of asset classes, most of that eleven thousand billion we lost in the financial crisis wasn’t really money to begin with.

We can and should argue that debt is real, because it’s what keeps us working. But if this money was lost, from where? And where did it come from in the first place? And if any people truly lost that much money, how could the top half of the image make any sense, as in, how is any of that possibly paid for? If we really did ‘lose’ that, wouldn’t the rest of that spending necessarily shut down?

Well here I am having a conversation with a comment box again. I didn’t mean all that just for you alone, but as you can see, the graph had an effect on me. Keep it up.

Super graphic.

it makes me wonder however, if it would cost a total of $364bn to lift 1bn people out of extreme poverty and eradicate AIDS worldwide, and if the total of Foreign Aid Payments and annual donations made by Americans to charity (before even considering donations to charity from non-Americans) is $428bn, why haven’t we already eradicated extreme poverty and AIDS?? Is aid spending so inefficient, poorly targeted, or wasted?

Of course, once you start trying to understand the logic of spending priorities, you can get yourself horribly confused … how, after all, can one justify expenditure on wars that many disagree should even have been started, when that money would appear to solve such important social human issues.

Very Interesting – Gifts to Doctors by the Pharma industry – it’s no wonder they still can’t (shouldn’t or wouldn’t) cure most major diseases.

I wonder how gifts to propagandists …err politicians, by lobbyists would compare – of course those come from many industry groups so in effect, all of the electorate must be fairly represented under the $1=1 vote Constitution of the Great Plutocracy.

I also wonder how these sums are earned – If I earned $1/min, worked 60hr’s/wk., 50wks/yr, spent nothing and paid no taxes, I couldn’t earn a $1B until I was into my 70′s. So just how are the taxpayers going to pay off these debts and why should they? The sums are more than imaginable for most citizens of the world; they can hardly be considered responsible for the decisions made that resulted in these debt sums; neither are they beneficiaries of the benefits derived from the ludicrous & irresponsible decisions made. No good can come of this.

on energy consumption: why don’t you build one of these with his data? http://www.withouthotair.com/ would be cool indeed (he all writes using the same measure unit, so you could split each part of a giant square (12k kwh per day per person consumption) with smaller squares (representing each energy alternative, wind, solar panels, nuclear etc.)

Is it really helpful to have a graph that represents some items total costs and others yearly costs. For example, showing the total eventual cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars next to the yearly budget for Medicaid & Medicare (Social Security is not listed either.) would possibly leave an uniformed viewer to think the War in Iraq was more expensive than the social welfare state in America. In the seven years so far Medicaid & Medicare have been far more expensive. Also how can people living under corrupt regimes operating on Aid money lift people out of poverty if given more money?