Economics: The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009

It's good to look at things in perspective occasionally.

This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they're meaningless without context. But they're continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money.

So here we've scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.

Note the bottom box.

For more, see The Billion Dollar-O-Gram 2009 by David Mccandless, Matthew Sawh, Caroline Flyn, James Key, July 14, 2010, at Information Is Beautiful.