Printing Money

What it is

Printing Money is a page that shows how fast money arrives, one animated row at a time. Minimum wage prints slowly at the top. Below it a teacher, a software engineer, a physician and a Fortune 500 chief executive, each row spitting out bills in real time at the rate the page assigns them. Then the companies start, and the rows keep getting faster all the way down, past anything a person could earn, to a final row that makes everything above it look slow.

How to play

Scroll and watch. Each row is a live counter, so the longer you leave the page open the further the top row falls behind the bottom one. There is one thing to do: type your own hourly pay into the box in the middle and watch your row print alongside the rest. That is where most people go quiet.

What makes it different

Charts of inequality are easy to skim. This page refuses to be skimmed, because the numbers are not printed on it, they are happening on it. A figure with that many zeros is abstract until you have watched a minute of it pile up under your minimum-wage row, which has produced a single bill in the same time. It is data visualization as a small cruelty, and it is very good at its job.

Why it is on Bored

Few pages change how a number feels rather than what you know about it, and this is one. You cannot do anything with the feeling, but you will not forget it either, and that is reason enough for a link.

Tips

• Type in your real hourly rate before you look at the rows below it
• Leave the tab open for a few minutes and come back to it
• The figures are the page's own and undated, so treat them as scale, not as today's numbers

FAQ