Does anyone think this chart by xkcd should be in schools to help students understand money, taxes, expenses, income and other economic issues?

Could you post a link to the chart?

I think such a chart could be an excellent teaching tool. OTOH, such a chart has quite a potential to be abused as a political tool to skew the opinions of our children (I believe the PC term is indoctrinate) towards a chosen socioeconomic viewpoint.

Impossible to tell if this chart is an impartial teaching tool or a way to push the whole “evil capitalist” world view without actually seeing it.

I can’t seem to get it in such a format that I can make it out. Even zooming doesn’t help, it just gets blurrier.

It seems totally impartial and fair to me. It’s just facts scaled in a clever manner. You start off on the upper left with a dollar. Then it gets larger and larger into the trillions. It is fantastic.
@JilltheTooth Just click it and use the zoom on the left side of your display. It works fine for me (Firefox).

I would be better able to render an opinion if I could read it.

Sure why not… It would look great posted aside my illustrated guide to the NSFW Kama Sutra.

@worriedguy : Thanks! I couldn’t seem to find that on my own…some days the door eludes me as well….

Is that chart supposed to simplify things? o.O There are friggin boxes everywhere !

Yes. Most people don’t understand numbers at all. Good book to read that EVERY school teacher should be made to read and understand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book)

Download the chart, don’t try to read it in your browser. I found this to be absolutely fascinating. If I taught an economics class, I would absolutely use it.

It’s not my cup of tea.

I could spend hours looking at it! Clearly they put a lot of work into this project.

As long as someone explains it to them, and all of us lol. That chart needs a tour guide lol. It is amazing, though.

I’m not a very visual person.

jaw-drop at the 1965 vs 2007 average hourly wage of a production line worker vs. CEOs.

I agree it should be in a classroom. I’ll share this with our Economy teacher.

Yes ! I ran across that recently from another source and I think it’s eye-opening.
The relative orders of magnitude are startling.
That kind of information should definitely be in the schools
@linguaphile the CEO compensation is mind-numbing, but I didn’t see hedge-fund managers compensation which would just knock you over – that’s another order of magnitude larger than CEOs.

It reminds me of the unobvious orders of magnitude of the effects of approaches to “green” lifestyle changes. People can recycle their containers and ride a bike and turn the lights off, but as soon as you take a trans-continental flight you’ve blown a year or so of moderation out the window.

I just discovered the comment about the EPA’s value of human life, $8.4 Million. They call this VSL Value of Statistical Life. Interesting.

I feel like I’m missing something when I look at it. Like, I get the sense I’m supposed to be shocked by how much/little money is being spent on something, but instead I run into a wall of facts and can’t get anything useful out of it.

It’s good. Much better if you can see it all at once. Could be expanded even more.

Somewhere I saw a section-by-section walkthrough of that chart… If I find that I’ll post it, it was very useful to understand the chunks one at a time.

A bit of an eye chart and hard to read. However I did learn something.

There are 1.6 MILLION households out there with an annual income $400K and above. I really expected the number of households in this bracket to be quite a bit smaller.

As for the rest, approximately half of the households in this country are pulling down more than $55K and of those approximately half of them are pulling in more than $90K per year.

GOD BLESS AMERICA!