I love David McCandless’s information visualizations at Information is Beautiful.
Today’s project is a re-visualization of Business Insider’s charts for their post ‘What the Wall Street Protestors are so Angry about…‘
McCandless has a gift for making data instantly grok-able.
Sweden at 23x still seems pretty damn high. The poverty line for a 4 person family in the US is $22,050 and I started to play with the numbers above before I realized that they’re based on the Gini Coefficient…which is above my math level.
Though sometimes narrative can be much more powerful. This one has been making the rounds.
1 comment so far ↓
Graphs and/or visualizations are completely irrelevant. If you don’t know the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer by now, your head is up your ass.
Money is in the hands of the rich. That isn’t going to change. They aren’t going to share nor would you if you were rich. You may support a worthy social cause but you would never hand over your wealth to individuals who didn’t deserve it, didn’t work for it. The rich won’t either. The rich couldn’t be happier with how things are.
The only way to change the status quo in America is to encourage Congress to tweak capitalism with rules and reforms. But, if American corporations own Congress, then Congress will always work of, by, and for corporations, not of, by, and for the American people. No reason they should.
We contact our representatives with our concerns. Staffers tally the do’s and don’ts from constituents. Corporations lobby and give money for re-election campaigns. Who would you listen to?
Representative government isn’t working and hasn’t worked since Eisenhower’s presidency in the Fifties.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
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