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About this project
What this amount really worth ?
That's the simple question this project wants to answer.
News and political speeches contain a lot of big amounts but such numbers are not easily understandable by themselves.
Are you be able to represent yourself what really are 5 billion US Dollars?
We created this tool to compare such big amounts, we called these amounts the stories.
A story, in our application, represents a spending. It can be all kind of spending, like public budget, construction costs etc..
Every spending must be described with the following information:
- the currency used
- the amount of the spending
- its year
We identified two different kinds of stories, the unique events and the repeatable events.
Unique events are spending that are set for a particular event such as the construction cost for a building. They're not meant to be repeated in the time, when the building is constructed the story ends here.
These unique events can be compared to an amount thanks to a percentage.
this amount is X percent of this story.
Repeatable events are events repeatable over the years. The annual government's budgets are a good example of repeatable events.
When we compare an amount to such stories we can give a time equivalence (like months, weeks, days):
this amount is X months of this story.
Sticky stories are not a different kind of stories. It's just a way to make some stories more important in our application. Such stories are the stories the administrators intent to draw attention to.
This can be tabloid stories or well known stories that are easily memorable.
Because we are dealing with passed events and spending amounts, we need to compensate the inflation of the stories. Indeed, in order to compare big amounts we need those amounts to be comparable. To insure every stories can be compared to an amount we also convert their amount into US Dollars.
We use 2 information to do this compensation:
- the story's consumer price index based on its country and its year.
- the convertion rate of the story's currency to US dollar.
- Consumer Price Indexes: World Bank, through a fork of the economics python module.
- Currencies exchange Rates: OpenExchangeRates