Firm investment paths on one absolute scale

Question. How far apart are the biggest and smallest firms' investment paths?

Encoding. A repeated path for each firm shows recorded investment using the same vertical scale.
Ordering. Firm names alphabetically; years ascend inside each row.
Baseline. A shared zero baseline makes absolute investment heights comparable.
Scale. Shared linear source 1947-dollar units; no unverified multiplier added.

What this design gives up

Smaller firms become compressed. That is an honest consequence of absolute comparison, not a reason to secretly rescale each row.

These selected historical firms are not a random sample of all businesses. First differences remain observational and can amplify measurement noise. Source monetary units are retained without an unverified multiplier.