Discretionary Spending Dashboards
I love dashboards. Especially when they allow you to do comparative analysis. Recently New York Times published a dashboard to show how people spend their discretionary income in various countries across the globe.
I find it fascinating that US, which has about 4.54% of world population (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population), appears prominently and dominates every category listed. What happens to all the stuff that people spend their money on? Except for recreation and alcohol, I wonder what percent of other categories end up in landfills or clutter in homes.
Take a look and see how your part of the world is spending its money.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/09/04/business/20080907-metrics-graphic.html