

Visualizing America's Debt - cwan
http://www.billshrink.com/blog/7779/visualizing-americas-national-debt/

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iamwil
Blah. There's a prevalence of bad visualizations like this that we eat up just
because it looks pretty and it has gradients.

In the first bar graph, the increases in year aren't consistent even though
the spacing between the bars and widths of bars are consistent. That makes it
deceptive to the eye about the overall trend of the national debt.

Not only that, a downward pointing bar graph with the color red usually
indicates some sort of negative number or amount in opposition to the the
graph pointing upward and colored blue. But it ends up that they're both debt,
but measured in different ways, and not at all in opposition to each other!

Visualizations are basically summaries of data. To have to fill in those
spaces in time with my mind mentally is work that I shouldn't be doing.

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samdk
Some of these graphs are much more confusing than they need to be.

The money scales should remain more consistent. Most of the graphs are scaled
in billions of dollars, but one is in trillions, and one is (completely
inexplicably) in millions of dollars.

The 'Strategic Petroleum Reserve' chart doesn't tell me much. It tells us a
value of the strategic petroleum reserves once, and then gives two values for
the price of a barrel. Which is being used to calculate the total value?

The brown/grey background also makes several of the charts much more difficult
to read. It's very hard to see any but the darkest-colored countries on the
map of foreign countries that hold US national debt.

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joe_the_user
Yes, it's a terrible page.

I have no idea how it got to the front page.

Half the debt figures are future projected values and we know how dubious
those are.

Even more, the _time scale_ isn't consistent. It starts with ten year jumps
and then shifts to one jumps and then goes into the future.

One interesting thing is showed was that China seemed to hold no more than
about 5% of US debt - but since it only gave visual illustration, the figure
is sadly inexact.

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johnohara
These debt graphs are notoriously variable. Google "debt as a percent of GDP"
and you will find all sorts of diagrams each showing a different percentage.

Some show the U.S.A. at 98% of GDP, others show it at 60%, and still others
fall somewhere in between.

There is "what is owed" versus "what is obligated" versus "what is projected."

No wonder I'm the first to comment in over an hour.

