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In pirate fiction, maps disclose the location of hidden riches. They perform a similar function in the Atlas of Finance: helping armchair voyagers visualise where money flows to and pools in the real world.
Lead writer Dariusz Wójcik points out that financial graphics often concentrate on ephemeral fluctuations in value. An example would be a graph of a jump in the gold or oil price over a few turbulent weeks. The author believes too little effort is expended in mapping long-term distributions in ways helpful to non-specialists. He thinks this makes pressing problems, such as climate change, tougher to understand and thus harder to fix. The Atlas is his response, produced with cartographer James Cheshire and graphic artist Oliver Uberti.
The book is a lot of fun. Data-fixated readers will enjoy unpicking its main content: a series of elegantly produced maps, graphs and other visualisations. These are eclectic in scope and ambitious in intent.
A good chart is often worth a thousand words or numbers. The trump card of the graphic is an ability to show scale. The UK’s pre-eminence in foreign exchange trading — $3.6tn in daily dealings in 2019 compared with $1.4tn for the US — is clearer in proportionate “bubble charts” than text alone.
A map is meanwhile the surest way for a financial tourist to internalise the disappointing reality that the financial centre known as Wall Street now mainly resides in Midtown Manhattan, not the historic thoroughfare of that name.
Sometimes, the strongest conclusion is delivered by way of a practical challenge to the chart maker. For example, the book’s version of the global wealth pyramid has to deploy an inset to subdivide the 1.9mn people at the top. There are too few of them to do this neatly on the main chart. Between them, they controlled 15.8 per cent of global wealth in 2020.
Graphic software has given data visualisers a new tool set to play with. An intricate and rather pretty diagram of corporate profit-shifting from higher tax countries to lower tax jurisdictions would have been hard to produce without a computer. It makes the point that some tax havens matter more as conduits than final destinations.
A few spreads fall flat. The underwhelming takeaway from a beautiful circular diagram concerning money laundering is that there has probably been a lot of it going on in Moldova. And it would have been best to illustrate African chattel enslavement conventionally, via the triangular trade between Britain, Africa and the New World. Instead, the book zooms in on unquantified tainted donations to a few Glasgow institutions.
Readers have to live with the problem that big financial upsums are ephemeral in their own way. Numbers delineating historic events, such as the Greek debt crisis, have infinite shelf life. But data describing continuing trends go on accumulating after typescript delivery deadlines have passed.
An eye-catching spread on sanctions accordingly stops the clock at the end of 2019. In 2022, Russia mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the free world retaliated with a blizzard of financial prohibitions.
These are quibbles. There is more to enjoy than to carp at in the Atlas of Finance. You might, for example, have an anecdotal sense that western banks are massively dependent on workers in Bengaluru for IT services. Seeing it itemised by institution and city district brings it home, in both senses of the phrase.
Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global Story of Money by Dariusz Wójcik, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti Yale University Press $40/£30, 240 pages
Jonathan Guthrie is a journalist, adviser and a former head of the Lex column
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