Book Review: The Global Economy as You’ve Never Seen It by Thomas Ramge and Jan Schwochow with Adrian Garcia-Landa

"Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space."
~ Edward R. Tufte

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Thomas Ramge and Jan Schwochow hail from Berlin.

Ramge is the author of more than a dozen nonfiction books, including Who's Afraid of AI and Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data, coauthored with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. He writes for The Economist—a magazine defined by excellence in illustration and graphics.

Jan Schwochow is the founder of Infographics, a group that describes themselves as follows: "Our world has become a place of too much information and too little insight. At the Infographics Group, we explore, condense and convey the facts as a narrative designed to deliver awareness and understanding."

Together they have created a new masterpiece of economics infographics—The Global Economy As You've Never Seen It—with a credit for fellow Berlin journalist Adrian Garcia-Landa.

This book is big, it's bright, and it presents 197 pages of ingenious infographics that do a remarkable job of helping you understand and appreciate the global economy. I have read it once. I am going to read it again. This is a book to leave in your den or near your desk to digest and think about at least one infographic a day until you have fully digested all that it has to offer.

This is also a great book to help you teach your kids how the global economy works. Who says economics can't be family fun?

The book's promo is right: "See the global economy as you never have before in this fully illustrated, full-color, ingeniously constructed tour of all its key components, deconstructed piece by piece in 99 illuminating infographics."