Numbers Don’t Lie – But We Can’t Comprehend Them
Another reason we’ve allowed the economy to fail…
We have been taught since childhood that numbers are very specific things. We’ve also been told that numbers are very precise. And in fact they are. We can rely on numbers to tell us the truth, and nothing but the truth. I mean a 1 is a 1, and a 3 is a 3. But, unfortunately, we really can’t comprehend/experience numbers. And we have specific limitations in the ways we can deal with them in our heads – prodigies notwithstanding.
Like computers, we humans are binary. That means we can pretty much only deal with two things at the same time – and even that with specific limitations. Adding numbers together gives us a quick way to see (and prove) this to ourselves. If I say to add the following simple numbers together in your head: 5 + 3 + 2 + 4, you don’t not instantly arrive at the sum of 14. Rather, you add two numbers together, then the third, then the fourth: 5 +3 = 8 + 2 = 10 + 4 = 14 – though you may choose to add them in a different order. Voila – limitation proven!
We also cannot comprehend numbers that are, depending on the individual, over the number 6. Now wait – before you go rolling your eyes and thinking that I have a single digit IQ – think about it. If I say the number 73, then you try to imagine it – or relate it to something you are familiar with. This is extremely difficult in most instances as we do not have relative concepts or experiences with most numbers. If I say 5, you can know it’s the number of fingers (including the thumb) on one hand. You really do comprehend this number. 6 is pretty easy too, but after that it gets tougher – quickly.
The first use of the concepts of counting and numbers were simply one-to-one correspondence[JH1] . I could come to your mud or grass hut with nine stones in my hand and tell you that I had that many ears of corn to trade, or that many arrows to trade. To keep track of how many goats I had, I just carried the corresponding number of pebbles around in my belt-attached bag, or left them at the hut. It was marvelously simple, but obviously not without limitations.
So what does all this have to do with the current economic woes of the country? It’s simple. When our leaders stand up and say we’re going to take $750 billion of your tax dollars and give it to companies that are failing – we tend to think Hmmm – 750, that’s not nearly as much as I paid for my car. We have absolutely no way of actually comprehending or experiencing the number 750, much less 750 billion. And when we start dealing with the national debt, and money owed by us to other countries, it gets worse. $1.7 trillion – heck, 1.7? That’s such a small number – even though we know “trillion” means a whole lot.
So how much is $750 billion, or $750,000,000,000.00… Let me make it so you CAN comprehend and experience it – or at least I’ll give it a try. It means that I could give every man, woman and child in the United States about $2,500.00 – figuring a 300,000,000 population. Still not able to comprehend it – okay – let’s try another way. If you were to travel 750 billion miles, you could make just over 3,906 ROUND trips to our sun. But that’s still too big, isn’t it. We need to get that number down to a mind-manageable size – something that’s 6 or less…
Our lovely blue planet has about 196,950,000 square miles of surface area. If you lived on a planet with 750,000,000,000 square miles of surface area, it would be the equivalent of 3,808 earths. Gravity would be a bitch! Well, that’s down from the trips to the sun analogy, but we’re still a long way from experiencing the number. (By the way, the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, is only about 1,000 times the size of earth.) This is going to be tougher than I thought when I started writing this article.
If I had $750 billion, and I gave you $1 million every hour of every day, I could pay you for 85,616,438.36 YEARS. That didn’t work very well. Okay, how about I give you $1 million every second of every day. Drat – I could still pay you for 23,782.3 years. If I gave you $10 million per second, I’d still be shelling out the big bucks for over 237 years – several lifetimes. And I don’t think I could hand you $10 million every second. And even if I could, you wouldn’t have time to spend it – where’s the fun in that?
I am very disappointed in my performance of the task here. I mean, all I’m trying to do is help you experience how much money (your tax dollars, in fact) $750 billion is…
I don’t guess it would help if I told you that 750 billion is about twice as many stars as there are in our entire galaxy – since we can only see a very tiny percentage of the stars in our galaxy.
I’ll try just one more. If you had a piece of paper – a really long one – and you made 5 dots on every inch of that piece of paper until you’d made 750 billion dots, you could wrap the piece of paper around the earth’s equator only one time. There – now we’re down to a small enough number to deal with – 1. Somehow, I’m left feeling I’ve failed herein.
$750,000,000,000.00 is an awesome, literally unimaginable amount of money – your money. Are you really sure you want it spent helping out companies that eagerly glutted during the good times? Companies that give bonuses in the hundreds of millions. Companies that casually foreclosed on people in need – with no thought of giving them the helping hand they are now getting from the government? Take a minute and think about it. Apparently, only half of the money has been given away so far – maybe you’d like to consider making some noise with your representatives. Maybe tell some of your friends to do the same thing.
PS If you figure out a way to help someone experience 750 billion, please do let me know what it is – thanks in advance…
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