I recently saw this very interesting post about the incomprehensibly large 2008 Bailout package that the US governement is currently wrangling. The post makes an attempt to represent the bailout as an information graphic and unfortunately, the author has used an insidious pie chart to do so.

I hate pie charts. There, I’ve said it. As an alternative, here’s a much improved representation of the same graphic. This histogram is a much simpler representation, which doesn’t suffer the same problems that multicolored pie charts present (poor judgement of irregular areas, and comparison of areas that do not have a common origin or terminus). In the revised version, the focus is on the content, rather than the colors. Easy comparisons can be made and the relative sizes of these quantities can be compared with less likelyhood of error or misjudgment.

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