Understanding the European Crisis Now

Last week the New York Times posted an interesting infographic Understanding the European Crisis Now. It's a little too big to include here but it's clever showing successive parts of the argument as scaled maps of European countries.

I first saw it embedded at The Big Picture but they left out the text at the left. Without that text I feel it stresses the wrong thing, missing that the real reason debt has ballooned is that it's measured as Debt/GDP and GDP has shrunk in the recession while unemployment payments have grown and bailouts have come up short.

Without the text, the next graph of unemployment comes off as a result than the source of the problem. Put people back to work and GDP will rise while government payouts will shrink. The argument is for bigger bailouts to kickstart this. The text makes this clear:

"But when the financial crisis erupted, the economies shrank and their debts ballooned. Investors began to lose faith in the ability of those countries to repay their debts."

"The best and perhaps the only way for Europe to recover from its financial problems is to get its economies growing rapidly again. That could ease some of the pain that has led to political and social unrest."

So I'm not sure if it's a good graphic or not, but it's definitely good with the text and bad without.