In their defense, it does say “note: some slight visual cheating to make things fit”, it does list the actual numbers, and fudging by a factor of about 1.5 still leaves order-of-magnitude differences perfectly clear. But it should have been done better.
Were you inspired by the Debtris visualization?
Unfortunately, those boxes aren’t actually to scale!
Compare, for example, “Big Tobacco Settlement” and “Amount needed to help developing nations combat climate change
static image
Huh- that’s disappointing.
In their defense, it does say “note: some slight visual cheating to make things fit”, it does list the actual numbers, and fudging by a factor of about 1.5 still leaves order-of-magnitude differences perfectly clear. But it should have been done better.