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The analogy falls a little flat because most people can conceptualise a cow easily enough, but most people have zero intuitive concept of how much 500 million d

The analogy falls a little flat because most people can conceptualise a cow easily enough, but most people have zero intuitive concept of how much 500 million dollars is.

jodrellblank 5y ago
It falls a little flat because of that, but it should still be a quantity which feels suspicious: - One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example? - One person could spend $1M-per-American without anything very interesting or noteworthy happening to the people taking that money in payment. - One person could spend enough for $1M/American on a Presidential run and lose; did Hillary and Trump and the other candidates also spend that much (WOW!) or did they spend nothing by comparison and still beat Bloomberg? (also wow!). - One Presidential run could cost so much; $1M/American is a lot more than Americans earn every year and therefore pay in tax every year, and handwaving debt away it's therefore many times more than government annual spending on everything; infrastructure, military, social services, schooling, etc. Suspiciously high. - A million per American is in the region of 340 Trillion, several times the world's GDP. "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman
- Riseed 5y ago
  > One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example? Once net worth is that high, the majority of it seems to be attributable to stock market and other similarly intangible $, rather than $ someone has literally directly taken/earned from others. It seems unfair to expect humans to contemplate big numbers (something we're known to be bad at) by also thinking about imaginary $ as though they had a 1-for-1 tangible source. That being said, you certainly aren't wrong to think of it this way. For example, Bezos' net worth of ~$110B / ~333M Americans = ~$333/American , which sounds like a reasonable ballpark approximation of how much _profit_ the average person has spent on Amazon + Audible + AWS + WaPo. Thanks for giving examples of logical ways to process large numbers. These are good ways to double-check quick maths.
MontyCarloHall 5y ago
I agree that most people probably have zero intuitive concept what $500MM can actually buy in concrete terms (e.g. how many yachts/mansions/political capital/failed presidential campaigns/etc.), but I think they do have the intuition that no individual has enough money to make every single person in the US wealthy.

The analogy falls a little flat because most people can conceptualise a cow easily enough, but most people have zero intuitive concept of how much 500 million dollars is.

jodrellblank 5y ago

It falls a little flat because of that, but it should still be a quantity which feels suspicious: - One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example? - One person could spend $1M-per-American without anything very interesting or noteworthy happening to the people taking that money in payment. - One person could spend enough for $1M/American on a Presidential run and lose; did Hillary and Trump and the other candidates also spend that much (WOW!) or did they spend nothing by comparison and still beat Bloomberg? (also wow!). - One Presidential run could cost so much; $1M/American is a lot more than Americans earn every year and therefore pay in tax every year, and handwaving debt away it's therefore many times more than government annual spending on everything; infrastructure, military, social services, schooling, etc. Suspiciously high. - A million per American is in the region of 340 Trillion, several times the world's GDP. "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman

Riseed 5y ago
> One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example? Once net worth is that high, the majority of it seems to be attributable to stock market and other similarly intangible $, rather than $ someone has literally directly taken/earned from others. It seems unfair to expect humans to contemplate big numbers (something we're known to be bad at) by also thinking about imaginary $ as though they had a 1-for-1 tangible source. That being said, you certainly aren't wrong to think of it this way. For example, Bezos' net worth of ~$110B / ~333M Americans = ~$333/American , which sounds like a reasonable ballpark approximation of how much _profit_ the average person has spent on Amazon + Audible + AWS + WaPo. Thanks for giving examples of logical ways to process large numbers. These are good ways to double-check quick maths.

MontyCarloHall 5y ago

I agree that most people probably have zero intuitive concept what $500MM can actually buy in concrete terms (e.g. how many yachts/mansions/political capital/failed presidential campaigns/etc.), but I think they do have the intuition that no individual has enough money to make every single person in the US wealthy.