Pondering the Economic Vortex

Unbelievably, I didn’t realize that today was a day off until I rolled into the office.  With the day free it gave me some time to take a look at the xkcd poster that is newly hanging on the wall.

At the dollar level it shows the relative cost of goods and services for different kinds of technology, pets, and food.  There is a side-by-side comparison between average worker hourly compensation and average CEO wages.

The thousands level perspective contains bigger ticket items like cars and vacations as well as the cost of bigger personal projects such as college and raising children. Household income and investments are relevant here.

The millions turns more political.  It contains campaign fundraising for individuals.   it outlines the Net Worth of famous politicians, artists, and common rich folk.

The billions gets into the super rich classes of wealthy such as the Waltons and the Tech leaders like Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates, and also investors like Warren Buffet.  This area is the largest and breaks down where the money is…and is aptly named the economic vortex.  Corporate revenues, federal spending, household income, US GDP, huge projects, wars…its all here.  Smack in the middle is the breakdown of people as income earners into classes: the bottom 50%, the Upper middle incomes, the Upper incomes, the high incomes, and the 1%.  The amount of tax on each class that feeds into the federal and state budget is set apart.  The effect on each classes “money pit” of hypothetical redistributions aimed at raising every family’s income to various levels of wealth…showing just how much money the most wealthy have left over.

The trillions level provides a view of countries on a global level and across time.  It has the US contribution to global GDP over time. The interesting items here are the size of the derivatives market and value of resources that exist on the planet.  

I do love infographics.  There’s a lot to explore, plenty of information to overload my brain with.

The poster image is available here: http://xkcd.com/980/huge/