Every day, the news media confronts us with enormous budgets: $3,000,000,000,000 for the Iraq war, $2,800,000,000,000 for the financial recovery, $16,000,000,000 for Facebook. Except they’re usually reported with the ambiguous numerical categories of trillion and billion. When your daily budget is a dollar, $10 billion and $10 trillion both look astronomically large — but difficult to compare. While I think listing out zeroes is helpful, despite the added space required (Hey, everything is online now anyways!), visualizations can make that comparison even easier. David McCandless has put together a good visualization of various world budgets. Though I would disagree about some of the categorizations, since government stimulus money is not actually lost, the boxes themselves are relatively useful.
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Gradster One
morgante
Indeed. I’d like to think that in an ideal world we’d donate more to charity than we spend at Walmart. But that’ll never happen. We like stuff too much.