The Billion Dollar-o-Gram 2009

October 7, 2010

NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed.

Image Removed


More about this image

All the data and more billion dollar amounts: http://bit.ly/bndollar

A little context

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.

(**Sorry it’s taken me so long to update this image from the original version. I’ve revised and updated all the figures. Sourced some new numbers. And researched new ideas suggested by visitors. Thanks all!**)


Design: David McCandless | Research: David McCandless, Matthew Sawh, Caroline Flyn, James Key, Pearl-Doughty White.

Sources: NYTimes, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC and other media reports. Data: http://bit.ly/bndollar


All content [on original website “Information is Beautiful”] Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial David McCandless 2009 (unless otherwise stated) | Contact


Tags: Geopolitics & Military, Politics