Carl Sagan meets Everett Dirksen
The late great Carl Sagan made famous the phrase “billions and billions.” The former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen once said of U.S. federal spending, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Now these two perspectives combine in the form of a captivating infographic called The Billion Dollar Gram.
Information Is Beautiful has collected a several dozen buckets of data — from the size of the yoga industry to spending on the Iraq War to the Chinese defense budget — and given us a sense of their relative weight.
The juxtapositions are intriguing. For instance, African nations could repay their debts to western nations with just eight months worth of the bribes received by Russian officials each year. If the porn industry gave away half its yearly revenues, that would be enough to feed every kid in the world for a year. (Think of the new customers that would create! It’s win-win! – Ed.) Check out the graphic below, which you’ll need to click and expand to see in its full glory.
Thanks for the graph. Certainly with a reallocation of resources we could certainly shift our Future State! That said however, with the Americans spending $300 billion/year on charities, makes one wonder how much is lost to not for profit bureaucracy……
Fascinating. The challenge is always to put complex and diverse raw information into some kind of perspective and I can see this method working for a lot of things I do.
I believe Ev Dirksen’s statement referred to millions and not billions. Back in those days billions here and there would have been a really big deal.
@rod — If he said it, he said “billions.” But he might not have actually said it. See here: http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_emd_billionhere.htm .
Regardless, the billion dollar gram is impressive and so is Information is Beautiful. Thanks very much for these posts.
This graph is another example of our task to transform our world into the conceptual age. The information is available and conclusive. We all need to find creative ways to modify our spending patterns into a political and economic system for the sakenot only of human survival, but also human enhancement.