Big Numbers
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How much is $100 million dollars?
What about $1 billion? $100 billion?
$ 1 trillion?
I've been musing lately how often big numbers are thrown around in the news — especially in terms of dollars — and thinking that the common person really can't comprehend the size or scale. I feel like I'm growing numb to the ever-escalating numbers and I don't think I'm the only one whose eyes glaze over.
There's a risk in the detachment and the lack of understanding.
I thought it might be a public service to work on a project that helps people connect giant numbers with things that are tangible and relatable in their life. This would be done both through visualization and perhaps comparisons, analogies, metaphors.. whatever tool helps accurately comprehension.
Would love to discuss.
There's math involved.
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Thats a great idea. Were you thinking a meeple icon that represents the average yearly family income? And then a pile of them for the big numbers?
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Something like that. I'd love to talk through it. I'm not a huge fan of "average income" because it seems too limiting. Most people don't think of themselves as average (and, given the heterogeneous nature of the population, no one is truly average.)
"Am I average?" If not, then this doesn't really resonate.
I think it would be more meaningful if a person could identify where they land on a continuum of income, savings, net worth, expenses, geography, etc. and then have the numbers put into perspective based on a set of parameters. I think that would be more meaningful.
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That said, I also think it would be worth taking the numbers and putting them in terms that are kind of universal..
Like when they say that Elon Musk is getting a $1 trillion payout from Tesla, it means he could fund the entire US Food Stamp program for a year (100.3 billion)... and still have $899.7 billion leftover.
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From there, I'd explore what you could do with $899.7 billion.
Maybe in terms of healthcare and medical research. Maybe compare to State/Nation GDP.
Elon's just one example. Another is the amount of money being invested in AI companies right now. Or crypto markets.. Etc. The numbers are truly astounding — I'm just not convinced that we can wrap our heads around the magnitude of the money that is moving around right now.
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And the shift from public to private wealth is world wide. https://www.finance-watch.org/understand-finance/dashboard/public-vs-private-wealth/
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@djaboss Interesting! Makes sense. I think visual representations are the way to go. Visual > exponential number > indeterminate noun
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(Using US definitions where "billion" = 10⁹)
I have had good luck using seconds. 100,000 seconds is a little over a day. A million seconds is a little over 11 days. A billion seconds is a little over 30 years. A trillion seconds is a little over 30,000 years. The earliest evidence of anything resembling agriculture, a kind of gardening, is from about 23,000 years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture)
Then I challenge them to pick a company and government program to compare profit and delivery cost. For example, Cameco, a uranium mining company headquartered in Saskatchewan has profits in the range of $200 million per year. Saskatchewan government eliminated our rural public transit (STC) because it cost $17 million more to operate than the revenue it brought in. Easy peasy. One company could have funded the shortfall and still be very profitable. Spread that across a bunch of companies and it would be little more than a rounding error in their profit and loss statements.
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@jadero Bullseye. The analogy for seconds is helpful for most people to comprehend the scale. People can swap seconds for dollars and get a sense of how astronomical the gap is between someone who has $100,000 in their account to someone with $1 million.. etc.
However, the exponential notations are not helpful for a common person. They are just another symbolic representation that obfuscates the size / scale of the number. Anyway, I think it's important to note that it is a heavy lift to change the way the business and media world presents their numbers ($1 billion dollars vs $10⁹ dollars)
Just my 2 cents...
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By the way, a trillion seconds is more closely estimated to 31,688 years, 8 months, and 26 days.
When we round to a trillion seconds is 30,000 years... we're DROPPING 1688 years, 8 months and 26 days.
In terms of time: (assuming the starting date is November 20, 2025, subtracting 1,688 years, 8 months, and 26 days lands on the date February 22, 337.
And in terms of money, plenty of people would take just the 26 days we are dropping which is more than $2 million.
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I took an astronomy class in college, and one thing the prof kept hammering was that humans are really bad at conceptualising numbers larger than a few hundred. In terms of the class, that meant changing units constantly (i.e. light-minutes to lightyears to parsecs, etc) to keep the overall number down.
For numbers as big as a trillion, not sure how helpful this is though