This is exactly the wrong sort of visualization. It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol."
The US debt is a big number. So big that people have a hard time wrapping their head around it. They need a point of comparison. So what's a good point of comparison for the US debt? Hmm... we could use the federal budget, or GDP, or the world GDP, or the debt of other large nations. Or we could break it down per capita, and compare it to other per-capita things, like income or tax burden. Or... I know! We can convert the thing to hundred dollar bills, and put it next to the statue of liberty! That's a meaningful comparison!
It provides no information other than "big number is big, lol."
As an accurate, useful comparison it falls short, and there's a political agenda behind it (I hate politics, yet I'm commenting). But people don't regularly wrap their brain around how big a trillion really is. Had the site used sticks, marbles, pebbles or even an illustration related to time, it would have been useful. I remember as a child being taught the difference between a million and a billion in that manner and it was important to my relative understanding of numbers. Most people don't work with big numbers all day and could gain something from just that simple point ... big numbers are big.
It's dishonest, though, and reminds me of why I hate politics. At university, I had a philosophy professor who argued injustice by comparing the percentage of African-Americans on death row vs. other nations of origin, to the percentage of the African-Americans in the US population vs. other nations of origin. He provided those two numbers and much of the class was shocked. The problem is that the US doesn't pick random citizens to be on death row, it picks citizens who are convicted of capital crimes. A more honest comparison (and, still yet, illustrative of the point, though less dramatic) would be to compare the number of African-Americans convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death with the same rates of other minority groups (or even against everyone else as a whole would be an improvement), and then, of course, diving into conviction rates, reasonably provable false conviction rates and the host of other variables that enter into an imperfect system that is imperfect because human beings are imperfect.
EDIT: Improper use of asterisks. Tsk Tsk. Corrected my description of the professor's comparison by adding "vs. other nations of origin" since that's more accurate.
The problem is that the US doesn't pick random citizens to be on death row
The point of your professor's analysis was not that black people were more likely to be convicted, but that we've created a society where black people are more likely to commit crime. This is still a very serious social problem, if not quite as serious as the hypothetical one you dismiss.
Maybe the black people are committing the crime. Not society forcing them to. White people live in the same society. There are black people in Europe and Africa, etc. Lots of other explanations than concluding that US "society" (whatever that is) is forcing black people to commit crime.
Agreed. This visualization is only interesting to someone obsessed with the physical size of paper currency.
Planet Money recently did a nice job of comparing the current U.S. debt level and the historic debt levels of other countries to GDP, and how that impacted their economic fate:
People have physically handled $100 bills and visited the WTC and Statue of Liberty.
You want to explain abstractions in terms of concrete things like this, rather than in terms of other abstractions. And "GDP" is as abstract as it gets.
I don't think that really works. I've personally have handled a 1 million byte hard drive. So, if I want to understand how big a 1 trillion byte hard drive is, should I picture 1 million 1 megabyte hard drives? I've also got some RAM chips that are about 1 gigabyte in size, should I visualize the terabyte hard drive in terms of them?
Sure. That's one of the best ways to visualize what Moore's law actually means in concrete terms. What used to take a room is now in the palm of your hand.
I thought it was pretty sneaky to switch the base size of the tower of money in the WTC pic. For one thing including any rendition of the WTC is a powerful image, one that's usually invoked on purpose to stir emotion. Secondly to inflate, compared to the other pictures, the quantity on display is rather deceptive.
Is it someone with an axe to grind, or a political motivation? The WTC imagery + "WOW LOOK AT THIS DEBT WE SOMEHOW FIND OURSELVES IN ALL OF A SUDDEN" smacks of the Tea Party\far right to me...
Yes, that bugged me to - and I'm a "far right Tea Party" type.
Just re-arrange the prior pictures for consistency, and such wordy explanations are not needed to make sense of the visual.
Oh, and the point most certainly, and apolitically, is "wow look at this debt we somehow find ourselves in all of a sudden" - 60% of the debt pile showed up in the last 4 years.
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.
This 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.
I 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.
I agree although I think this sort of visualization does provide some perspective of how much "trillion" actually means which can be hard to grasp when just seeing the zeroes.
The US debt is a big number. So big that people have a hard time wrapping their head around it. They need a point of comparison. So what's a good point of comparison for the US debt? Hmm... we could use the federal budget, or GDP, or the world GDP, or the debt of other large nations. Or we could break it down per capita, and compare it to other per-capita things, like income or tax burden. Or... I know! We can convert the thing to hundred dollar bills, and put it next to the statue of liberty! That's a meaningful comparison!