Money Chart
by Jeff
(Click on the chart above to embiggen.)
Image text: There, I showed you it.
Well, that's why this one is late. It is MASSIVE. This is another chart that Randall does for xkcd from time to time. He has done maps of the Internet (twice) and other huge visualizations.
Dollar increments are different colors. Dollar increments are green. (Naturally, because American paper money is green.) Thousands are Orange/Red. Millions are gray. Billions are yellow. Trillions are blue.
Since there is so much information here, I'll pick out some interesting ones. Please comment below with your favorite entries or ones you would like to explain as I don't have the time to get to every single one.
In the dollar section, I think there is a typo in the bottom right hand corner. The two very small boxes are average worker hourly wage in 1965 and 2007. ($19.61 and $19.71, respectively) And then it has two much larger boxes, but both say "Typical 2007 CEO pay for the same period". But, the much smaller of the boxes should say "1965" instead. These four boxes indicate that the CEO pay has skyrocketed from 490.31 (hourly) to $5,419.97 (hourly) in the same time period in which the average worker's salary has skyrocketed 10 cents.
In the bottom of the Thousands chart, there is a reference to the song by Bare Naked Ladies entitled "If I Had A Million Dollars" and all the things referenced in the song to buy the love of another person.
Also in the Thousands chart is a reference to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardy from the popular book series by J.K. Rowling about Harry Potter. One box is the estimated yearly tuition for the school and the next is how much seven years at the school would cost. To get a degree at the school, it takes 7 years.
In the Billions section, I'll take on the "Fictional Billionaires".
Carlsine Cullen is from the Twilight Series of books and movies. He is a vampire and adoptive father of Edward, Emmett and Alice Cullen, as well as Rosalie and Jasper Halewho. He was born in the 1640s and amassed his wealth through many years of compound interest and investments.
Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon character from many properties including the afternoon cartoon, Duck Tales. Scrooge McDuck has a "money bin" full of coins and other sorts of collectibles that he routinely goes swimming in.
Bruce Wayne is Batman. Batman is Bruce Wayne. He is portrayed in many comic books, graphic novels, TV shows and movies by many different actors.
Artemis Fowl is an Irish child prodigy and a ruthless master criminal from the book Series by the same name. He uses his intelligence to build his family fortune through crime.
In the millions section, there is another reference to JK Rowling, in this case it is MC Front-A-Lot (The creator of the subgenre of hip-hop known as "Nerd Core") who estimated her net worth at $1 billion. But, that begs the question, why do the boxes only add up to $82,000? Is this another typo?
That is all I have time for today. What did you find interesting in this massive chart?
(PS - Since it is Thanksgiving Week in the US, I will be out and about on Wednesday and Friday this week. I'll have the comic explanations up, but they may be late.)
November 21st, 2011
embiggen! I love that word!
November 21st, 2011
Haha, thanks “DenverCoder9″. We appreciate any inside-xkcd jokes here.
November 21st, 2011
You should rent your website to someone who has more time. Your URL is worth a lot, and if someone spent more time on the content, this website could generate a lot more. You could get a good rent.
Or maybe I’m just all wrong and it’s not worth it.
November 21st, 2011
This topic has been beaten to death. Jeff does this as a courtesy, for no money, and out of love for the website and its readers; to shed a little bit of light on somethings that may be a little obscure to some individuals (like me!).
He brings to the table a brief description to the day’s comic but the real charm of the website is that the readership “embiggens” the explanation themselves and corrects when wrong (cudos to all those who explain the CS jokes). It’s a part of the dynamic that Jeff doesn’t over-do the explanation.
November 21st, 2011
Thanks Alex. I wish I had the time to research every bit of minutia in all the xkcd comics, but I might drive myself crazy even attempting that!
November 22nd, 2011
Tarkis was right about one thing. The URL is probably worth a bit. When I type “explain” into google you are the first suggestion.
Seeing as I use the internet to explain a lot of things to me I think that is pretty impressive, and well earned.
Besides, the comments fill in anything you might miss.
November 22nd, 2011
Google learns from your previous behavior. The only way to be sure that it would be the first suggestion everywhere is to use a computer that hasn’t gone to explainxkcd before.
November 22nd, 2011
Which I was using when I typed “explain xkcd” the first time that I didn’t understand one and ended up here.
November 22nd, 2011
This is my first visit to explainxckd, and i’ve never searched that term. (Got here by a link.) Just tried typing “explain ” and it suggested “explain xkcd”. Of course, I do visit xkcd regularly, so maybe it did learn from that. But I kind of doubt it.
November 22nd, 2011
Equivilant: Did the search in an incognito window and explainxkcd.com was no where to be found, sadly.
November 23rd, 2011
I would definitely have googled the site before so I guess I am not a good example.
I asked the guy sitting beside me to type “explain ” (with a space) into his computer and explain xkcd came up third.
He had never heard of the site before.
I am not really sure how google works but if you are anywhere near the top of their lists I think you are doing pretty good.
November 21st, 2011
I take point with the “billionaires” section. How does it work out that 1210 billionaires “only” have $334.49B between them? By definition, wouldn’t each of them have at least $1B of net worth, making it so that the combined net worth would be at least $1.21T? Perhaps it meant to sum the examples instead.
November 21st, 2011
Is it 334 Trillion? Or am I counting zeroes incorrectly?
November 21st, 2011
And the visualsation suggests $410B.
And both figures are acutally the same magnitude as the Top 10 Billionairies from the chart together.
November 21st, 2011
It appears that some typos have been fixed; I note that the combined net worth currently lists at 4.5 trillion. The boxes seem to corrently match that number.
November 23rd, 2011
Hmm. There are still many more mistakes. Under bailouts, the eurozone bailout fund is visually 5-6 times larger than the US bailout, but by the numbers below them, the US is twice as large. Off by 10?
November 21st, 2011
I also noticed the Rowling oddity. Looking jsut at the numbers, she’s currently worth 1 Billion, and if she had instead been a rappre it’s estimated she’d be worth… 1 Billion.
??
November 21st, 2011
It could be that some of the numbers are guesstimated, as it can be difficult to exact a precise number for the net worth of certain private individuals.
November 21st, 2011
Oh, and I should mention you seem a little lacking in the explain on this one…..
(I kid!)
November 21st, 2011
Haha, thanks Sean. There was a lot to this one, so there was a lot of material.
November 21st, 2011
Firefox won’t display it for me and even IE chokes on the graphic. Still, the level of detail is amazing. It’s clear he didn’t do this one in an afternoon. Wow.
November 22nd, 2011
Works perfectly fine here in Opera (it’s even a rather old version: 11.01).
November 28th, 2011
Firefox and IE work for me (FF v8.0 and IE9)
Some older browsers have various limitations, including the max size of displayed images. IE6 crashed (for me) on a 3000×3000px image (although it had a LOT of color and patterns, which might explain the crash – the CPU would have maxed out)
November 21st, 2011
This could take a while to analyze and find all the possible references/jokes!
Regarding the hourly wage – 1965/2007, since this is all in 2011 dollars these numbers may be correct. The workers actual wage has increased very little, while CEOs income has indeed skyrocketed.
November 22nd, 2011
Jeff wasn’t disagreeing, as he noted the same thing. He was pointing out a typo that Randall has since corrected.
November 21st, 2011
As to what I find noteworthy:
Look at the figure top right of “Thousands”.
“Typical household net worth by head of household’s age”.
Within 25 years, it has become one third for those younger than 35 and a half for those of age 35-44, respectively, while there is an 50% for those above 65.
Has anyone looked at the sources what it is supposed to suggest?
Worse jobs for beginners today?
Fewer financial mergers aka “marriages” than in 1984?
November 22nd, 2011
I did not look at the sources, but I think it’s the latter: People marry later than before, so a <35 aged head of household is likely to be the only person in his household. Age 35 through 44 probably used to even have (grown-up) children who could contribute to the household’s total income.
November 25th, 2011
I also have not yet checked the sources (still analyzing the raw data looking for jokes and errors) but here is my assumption. . . having lived through both periods:
When I got out of high school, it was nearly impossible for me to borrow money. I had a Sears card with a $500 limit, and was turned down for a $2,000 car loan because of my asset-to-debt ratio . . . even though I had a good job.
My son graduated from high school with two credit cards (combined limit of $17,000) despite the fact that he has never held a job. And he is under the impression based on the experience of his friends, that he could buy a car on credit.
So, since your debt is a negative value in your net-worth calculation, I assume that is why the average net worth has dropped over time.
November 21st, 2011
Under Trillions there are 3 $1,900,000,000 for Total annual tax breaks to the five largest oil companies, US annual oil and gas subsidies, and Ethanol subsidies. However, the number of yellow boxes next to each are different. I assume he just forgot to edit the values to $41._ trillion, and $4._ trillion for the last 2 of these.
November 21st, 2011
Sorry, $41._ billion, and $4._ billion
November 21st, 2011
Also, I think the value of Advanced Combined Cycle natural gas is supposed to be $78 billion (based on the graphic) not the $385,940,000,000 (probably copied from Solar Thermal).
November 21st, 2011
Under US Interstate Highway System my best guess is that the value should be $465,970,000,000 instead of the $165,970,000,000 shown (based on the graphic and that it says it is larger than the other public works).
For Truck Transportation I think it should be $117-118 billion not a copy of rail’s $31.73 billion.
November 21st, 2011
Is there a link to a printable/downloadable version of this? I would love to study it more carefully!
November 21st, 2011
^This.
I would probably buy a wall-sized poster if it existed.
November 21st, 2011
http://store.xkcd.com/xkcd/#MoneyPoster
November 22nd, 2011
Also, Randall has posted a direct link to download the full image in the last day. But thanks to all who provided scripts below.
November 21st, 2011
Me too. This would need to be a massive poster to fit all the detail in the image.
November 21st, 2011
I’m sure one will be available in time for Christmas!
November 21st, 2011
No, no. A big poster would be obsolete next year (due to inflation & other factors). What you really want is a big wall of monitors and an app that would constantly update the chart based on the latest data.
November 21st, 2011
If you want to assemble one yourself, here’s how:
1. Open up GIMP or your favorite image editor.
2. Create an image size (12528, 8352).
3. Download these files:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/money_tiles5/tile_000_0xx_0yy.png
(where xx = 00..48, yy = 00..32)
4. Paste each file into its appropriate x/y location.
[That's 1617 tiles, so you may wish to automate this process.]
You could perhaps more easily make an HTML table where each cell points to the appropriate image, then just view that in your browser.
November 21st, 2011
Darn, beat me to it!
November 21st, 2011
Here’s a C program to make the HTML table:
#include
main()
{
int x, y;
printf(”\n\n”);
printf(”\n”);
for(y=0; y<33; y++) {
printf("\n”);
for(x=0; x<49; x++) {
printf("\n”, x, y);
}
printf(”\n”);
}
printf(”\n”);
printf(”\n\n”);
}
November 21st, 2011
Heh, darn those input filters! They stripped out all the important HTML stuff. Let’s try the central part with square brackets instead of angled:
printf(”[html]\n[body]\n”);
printf(”[table border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\"]\n”);
for(y=0; y<33; y++) {
printf("[tr]\n");
for(x=0; x<49; x++) {
printf("[td][img src=\"http://imgs.xkcd.com/money_tiles5/tile_000_%03d_%03d.png\"][/td]\n", x, y);
}
printf("[/tr]\n");
}
printf("[/table]\n");
printf("[/body]\n[/html]\n");
November 21st, 2011
Here: https://gist.github.com/1384422 is a Perl script to join the tiles into a single image.
November 22nd, 2011
Here is the large png with the current version 9 files. Thanks to cjm for the perl script.
Enjoy!
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?bsr8e4s5acgz70g
November 21st, 2011
Please note that the URL name is changing as corrections are made. Instead of “money_tiles5″, it is currently at “money_tiles8″. It’s best to check the source of the comic from xkcd.com before proceeding.
November 21st, 2011
I haven’t seen anyone mention it but the image text possibly refers to the movie Jerry Maguire line “Show me the money”
November 21st, 2011
Gah! sorry for the downvote, I misclicked. But I think you’re right, I didn’t even think about that.
November 22nd, 2011
It could also be referring to the StarCraft cheat “show me the money”, which when used gives 1000 units of every resource. With the FUNDS reference, I think that’s the most likely source.
November 22nd, 2011
That cheat code is probably a reference to the film in the first place.
November 21st, 2011
I enjoyed (in the upper-right-ish part of the Thousands section) the mention of the price of a Waist-deep half-room ball pit.
http://xkcd.com/150/
November 21st, 2011
“Star Wars” missile defense system under billions
Also thought the “Cost to buy the world a coke” was cute
Minecraft sales can be seen in the millions (56.78 mill)
Also funny in the millions “lifetime cost to avoid changing your oil by abandoning your car and buying a new one every 5,000 miles” (3.27 mill)
Cost of one velociraptor 1.93 mill
Value of a solid gold toiled over the years can also be seen in the millions
A waist-deep half room ballpit would cost $2,400. Also in the thousands are the daily sales of minecraft ($193,500)
Last one– “Cost of the items the singer in “If I Had $1,000,000″ would buy in order to win your love – $263,330
November 21st, 2011
The US had a real Strategic Defense Initiative for finding ways to shoot down nuclear ballistic missiles that was proposed by the Reagan administration, known to be completely impossible, and referred to derisively as the “Star Wars Defense System.”
A lot of money was spent on real scientific research, so it wasn’t all bad.
Or at least, that’s what Wikipedia tells me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
November 21st, 2011
While I appreciate the joke, and don’t expect him to be letter-perfect on this type of joke, he forgot a few items from this list, such as an emu (though the lyric is a llama or an emu); “some art; a picasso or a garfunkel”, a monkey, and a green dress; (or perhaps a faux green dress).
November 25th, 2011
Darn! I came here to point that out, but not wanting to appear stupid to my on-line peers, had to read all 88 posts first. . . you beat me to it TH.
But i do wonder. . . why would a real green dress be cruel?
November 21st, 2011
I think there is an error in the Thousands section for Typical Household Income for the Top 1%. It’s listed as $201,100 (the same as for the Top 10%) but has enough boxes for the number to really be about $822,000.
November 21st, 2011
Figure I didn’t see: cost of making this chart (based on RM’s time only).
November 21st, 2011
I like how he adjusted 50 cents name for inflation.
November 21st, 2011
What is the “Typing F-U-N-D-S” referring to under the Thousands section?
November 21st, 2011
That’s a reference to the infamous FUNDS cheat code in the original SimCity — you typed in the word “FUNDS” to replenish your budget.
November 21st, 2011
Exactly, and see Gag Halfront’s comment below.
November 23rd, 2011
Actually, nearly, but not completely correct.
It’s always been typing “FUND”, not “FUNDS”. The cheatcode didn’t give you money, but a $10,000 loan you had to pay back with interest and doing it 3 or more times in a year caused an earthquake to hit your city.
The maximum amount of times you could use this cheat was exactly 8 times, trying to do it more only caused the quake to happen, but didn’t add any money anymore, since you were at your max loan.
*played this game waaaay too much*
November 21st, 2011
Also, dibbs on the $255B unclaimed money to the right of Total Spending on Primary and Secondary education in the US
November 21st, 2011
Anthony – in the original Sim City there was a cheat code that allowed you to raise your city’s bank account 10,000 dollars by typing FUNDS in all caps (pretty rapidly – I think all five chars had to be entered in less than ~3 secs). In a slightly later version, it was modified so that every nth typing of FUNDS (I think it was either five or ten) you got a huge earthquake for free.
The workaround for the earthquake was to type FUNDS 10-20 times before you started building and zoning…
November 21st, 2011
While the total value of “Total debt in the US” looks about right, the “Federal government” figure is a (fortunately!!) a thousand times larger than actual.
I almost said “a thousand times too large”, but that goes without saying…
Lovely chart, though!!
Dave
November 21st, 2011
Just thought I should say this…I’ve got loads of respect for him for putting so much time into researching and creating this. Sure there are plenty of typos and such, I mean, try going over such an expansive piece and catching every little mistake…it would be nearly impossible. But that’s where we come in! I found it amusing that they had films back in the year 193 (teehee). Oh and for the record, the J.K. Rowling reference isn’t a typo…he’s saying that she’s estimated as being worth 1B, while if she had been a rapper (according to MC Front-a-lot), she would only be worth 82M (heh, “only”).
November 21st, 2011
“Five things I learned researching this chart” actually shows six things.
November 21st, 2011
The “Europe (including Russia and Turkey)” in the Trillions section is of by a mere factor of 1000.
Oh you Amurkins!
Europe pwns USA, get used to it!
November 21st, 2011
my $tilesize = 256;
my $xsize = 49 * $tilesize;
my $ysize = 33 * $tilesize;
my $img = GD::Image->new($xsize, $ysize, 1);
my $white = $img->colorAllocate(248,248,248);
$img->filledRectangle(0,0,$xsize,$ysize,$white);
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
$ua->env_proxy;
for (my $x = 0; $x < 49; $x++)
{
for (my $y = 0; $y get($url);
print STDERR $resp->status_line;
print STDERR “\n”;
next unless $resp->is_success;
my $tile = GD::Image->new($resp->content);
next if ($tile->width == 1);
$img->copy($tile, $x * 256,$y * 256,0,0,256,256);
}
}
$img->trueColorToPalette(0, 255);
binmode STDOUT;
print $img->png(9);
November 21st, 2011
Thought I’d point out that Randall forgot the house, furniture for said house(including a chesterfield or ottoman), a K-car, lumber and other building materials for a tree fort, a llama(or emu), John Merrick’s remains, faux green dress, Picasso art, and monkey in “if I had a million dollars”, so the real total would be much higher than he forecast, and most likely more than one million dollars in any case.
November 21st, 2011
A Reliant is a K-car: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Reliant
November 21st, 2011
the house is in there…the furniture is too…presumably the cost of materials are included in building the tree fort…the llama’s there…so’s the K-car…as well as John Merrick’s remains (although they’re not for sale). The ones I’m really upset he missed are the emu and the green dress (though not a real green dress, that’s cruel!)
November 21st, 2011
Haven’t you ever wanted a monk-EY?
November 25th, 2011
YES! I’ve often wanted a monk-EE- (curse you “too short post” script!)
November 21st, 2011
for some reason, I only saw the green parts and totally missed the rest when I first looked at it. My bad.
November 22nd, 2011
The missing items are the (fake) green dress, some art (a Picasso or a Garfunkel) and a monkey. An emu is not needed, as the song clearly states Llama OR Emu, not both.
November 22nd, 2011
If he went with the Picasso this he could get away with for less than $50K. A Garfunkel would probably be a little cheaper though: EPA Value of a human life $8.12M, but probably not for good old Art.
November 21st, 2011
The growing, by year-graph in the trillions section with downturn years marked, am I stupid who can’t find a heading, or understand anyway, what the graph actually visualizes?
November 21st, 2011
That’s “Total Public Debt”.
November 23rd, 2011
I thought it was liquid assets
November 21st, 2011
The tiny landmasses made out of the trillions blocks in World GDP are pretty neat.
November 22nd, 2011
I thought that was great too.
November 21st, 2011
I don’t get the “value of an investment of $1000/yr” section. The interest rate is 5%, and the inflation rate is 3%. So clearly the real value should be more than the principal of $1000*30. So why is it only $27,370?
Coming from anyone else, I’d say I found a mistake. Coming from xkcd, I’ll pause and see if someone corrects me first.
November 21st, 2011
The “real value” is the value at the end of that time expressed in today’s dollars, which are worth more than the dollars 30 years down the road, due to inflation. To get that, just take the amount at the end and multiply it by (1-inflation/100)^(number of years ahead). In this case, 0.97^30 (though for some reason I haven’t yet figured out, here it’s closer to 29.1 instead of 30), which works out to about 0.4.
November 25th, 2011
I believe I’ve resolved the question. IMO, the numbers end up being somewhat misleading, but they are literally true.
You’re definitely right about how he gets the number. (Although, the inflation factor should be (1/1.03)^30 and not .97^30, which clears up the 29.1 v. 30 issue.)
Now that I see how it was computed, I can resolve “why is it less than the principle of $30,000?” The annual investment of $1000 is in nominal dollars. Measured in t=0 dollars, the investment amounts are $1000, $1000/1.03, $1000/1.03^2, etc. Thus, the principle is just over $20,000 (in t=0 dollars) and through a real interest rate of 2%, it grows to $27,370.
November 22nd, 2011
My favorite typo in the chart is on the left-hand side of the millions section, second from top, the Codex Leicester. It reminded me of http://xkcd.com/859/ (btw, have you ever noticed the frowny in the title bar of that comic?)
November 25th, 2011
I thought that WAS the joke? Unresolved tension =
November 22nd, 2011
I was shocked at the huge price dofference between papaerback/ hardcover/ audio books. Sure hardcovers are more expensive, but I wasn´t aware that the difference was that huge in the US.
And the numbers for campaigning money are shocking, especially looking at the steep rise over the last 3 campaigns.
What i like is that this chart points out that Avatar is definetly not the most successfull movie once you take inflalion into account, but Gone with the Wind, closely followed by Snowwhite
And although alread mentionend: I think it great that Velociraptors appear once more
November 22nd, 2011
And yet again I miss an edit function for MY typos.
November 22nd, 2011
Just noticed: Strange that the Magna Carta is worth so much less then some paintings. Sure the Mona Lisa is one of a kind.. but it does lack the historic value of the Magna Carta.
November 22nd, 2011
Here is the large png with the current version 9 files. Thanks to cjm for the perl script.
Enjoy!
http://www.mediafire.com/i/?bsr8e4s5acgz70g
This comment is the same as one up above, but for those who don’t read every comment, this is now at the bottom for you guys!
November 23rd, 2011
Version 9? So he is updating it to fix mistakes?
November 22nd, 2011
Looks like they put a link on the actual site to download the large image. Here’s the direct link:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/money_huge.png
December 3rd, 2011
The colors have interesting symbolism. Green is of course the standard color we think of when we hear the word “Money.” The orange-brownish material represents bronze or copper, relatively cheap metals. The grayish tint for “millions” could represent any number of metals, although it would make sense for it to mean silver, following with his pattern. Then it’s fairly obvious that the yellow for trillions is supposed to mean gold. And for trillions, the cyan color probably stands for diamond even though diamonds are not actually that color.
January 12th, 2012
Is it good to be 65 category? I’m stunned that people have so little
January 12th, 2012
Oof, website doesn’t escape greater than or less than… Is it good to be less than 30 but be in the greater than 65 category…
January 29th, 2012
How has nobody mentioned the single best reference in the entire chart? You’re all welcome, in advance.
http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-3661&y=-3932&z=6
February 3rd, 2012
Mind the bump:
The calculation of saving $1000/year coming out as less than was put in is wrong – because it’s assuming $1000 at the first year’s value, which should actually be adjusted down due to inflation. SO…according to proper math, you *do* make money off of those investments. Just not anywhere near as much as it looks like.