I can't believe such a high profile infographic would be less than truthful!
Nah, I'm just being silly. Infographics have no relation at all to truth. They just trick people into thinking they are seeing real facts because they resemble that statistics stuff. Which is math so it must be right. Or something. But it's not scary like math is. It's pretty like art. We like art. And shiny. And pudding. Mmmmm, pudding.
In this case, apparently they scaled the diameter, not the area. Perhaps this was unintentional. Regardless of the technical accuracy, actual visual comparisons, and therefore comprehension, are not facilitated because it very hard to compare areas unless they are overlapping (and often not even then). Some times circles are a good way to display secondary information where larger or smaller is much more important than how much larger. For this application there are far more useful ways to comunicate the same information. The most obvious is a bar chart. To eliminate the unsightly gridlines and make it easier to see multiples the bars could be segmented (small gaps every $2 trillion perhaps).
But this would be a bar chart, not an infographic and therefore appear "technical". Circles with pretty gradients look more aesthetic even if they do obfuscate the very information they purportedly convey.
And we do live in a world that values style over substance.
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