Visualizing Economics: Posters
As part of my Masters thesis at Carnegie Mellon's School of Design, I created three posters visualization economic data for people who are not experts in economics or statistics. The first poster visualizes the income distribution in the United States. The second poster focuses on the GDP of United States compared to other countries. Finally, the third poster visualizes the components that make up the GDP of the United States. You can download detailed description of my design process.
How Much Do You Earn?
When I first looked for examples of visualizations of income distribution, I wanted to see the incomes of the super rich compared to everyone else. However, each example I found did not show the "long tail" of households with annual incomes of 1 million or more. So I set out to find this income data and then attempted to graph it in order to answer this question for myself. The sources I found are from the IRS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Congressional Budget Office, and finally Forbes, Business Week, CFO magazines.
How Rich is the United States?
The United Status is a rich country but how rich is it? What you will commonly see presented is a bar graph showing the top ten countries by GDP. I took a different approach by creating a graph showing the top five countries in each region in the world. While the top ten countries are represented, you can compare them to their neighbors. Another benefit is this layout will include countries from poorer regions of the world in contrast to the wealthier ones. I also added each country’s population since one country may have a greater GDP than another but because of its greater population that country’s citizens are much poorer. The sources used are the CIA and The World Bank.
How Can You Measure A Nation’s Wealth?
What is GDP? You hear it discussed in the news but the definition given is rarely more detailed than measuring the goods and services produced in a country. In this poster, I tackled this question by looking at the GDP of the U.S. broken out into different industries: agriculture, manufacture, construction etc... I felt this was an intuitive way to look at a country’s GDP. At the same time, I talk about different methodologies for measuring the GDP. The sources used are the Bureau of Economics Analysis and The World Bank.