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The statue of liberty/wtc is somewhat of a silly point of comparison for national debt but grounding numbers into something familiar or in this case physical ob
by nuromancer 15y ago
The statue of liberty/wtc is somewhat of a silly point of comparison for national debt but grounding numbers into something familiar or in this case physical objects is quite telling for most people. Even if your point of comparison is "the federal budget/GDP/world GDP/debt of other large nations" it goes back to the same issue where you are comparing large numbers to other large numbers which is meaningless to most people(outside of HN). I wouldn't use this type of visualization to brief congress but it is telling.
- _delirium 15y agoThis rhetoric is very non-specific though, which isn't usually a good feature of visualizations if you want them to be informative (rather than just rhetoric). Any amount of money beyond those that a normal household deals with would take up a lot of physical space with current paper currency, because we don't use bills above $100. Historically, inter-bank transfers actually happened using very large notes, or precious metals; now they go electronically, so paper money isn't set up to deal with macroeconomic sums. If you want to impress someone with how obscenely large some dollar figure is, you can use exactly this "giant pile of cash" technique from any political perspective! Federal debt is a mountain of cash; Wall Street bonuses are a skyscraper of cash; Google profits are a Manhattan apartment block of cash; Medicare spending is Saturn V rockets full of cash; corporate tax evasion is a stack of dollar bills going to the moon; George Soros's bank account holds 140 metric tons in $1s; etc.
- glhaynes 15y agoI think that's just the thing: it's telling, but not of any valuable information. And that's the last thing our political dialog needs right now: we've got a million times too much as it is.