Boxes: A Tale of Abstraction

After watching the beautiful first video from Information Is Beautiful (appropriately named, aren't they?), I can't help but throw another naive rallying cry out into the void for a shift along our production possibilities frontier from knives to butter. It all looks so simple! If that box is that big and this box is only this big, shouldn't we be able to move a little from that box to this box? Come on! They're just boxes!