I prefer “what’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars.”
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Honestly, is "a thousand times more" too much for people to process?
Seems pretty straight forward.
In some countries "billion" menas a million millions, that one would make more sense to me.
I'd say 1000x really is too hard to process. We hear the words, millions and billions and sometime trillions thrown around in the modern world. I'd guess most people process "billion" as "a lot more" than a million. Hell, we can hardly relate to 1,000,000 IRL.
It really is hard to get our monkey brains around, didn't evolve to deal with massive numbers.
EDIT: Forgot to add this anecdote.
Read a story where a local elementary teacher had a project for her kids to come up with a million bottle caps. Idea being to show them what a mind-blowing number a million is. Yeah. You could hide several bodies in that pile. It was freaky.
Well, our brain obviously can't understand 1 million individual items independently at once, that's not how we're wired. But we do understand what 1000 times more means conceptually.
I do understand what I can buy with 1000 dollars. We don't need to see every dollar as a individual entity in our minds to understand 1000 dollars.
It's easier to visualize this way : you have 100 dollars in your pocket. There is 10 cents on the pavement. Do you care about those ten cents? Probably not. They are just a rounding error.
A nice exercise is to take a small amount, like 50€ or maybe 1000€ if you have a steady job, and think how that would change your life if you were given it.
Then double (roughly) and think what you can do with that much money.
Repeat until you can't really know the difference.
No one needs a billion.
A million? Retire at 60 instead of 70, and change nothing else.
A billion? Retire today, buy a few mansions across the world, and start a few SuperPACs.
From there, it’s just more SuperPACs for a while.
A trillion? Add in a mercenary army with a few spy satellites.
You missed the point of the exercise.
What would you do with 50k?
100k?
200k
500k
1M
2M
5M
10, 20, 50, 100, 250M?
500 Millions?
1B?
Then think how many people could have a better life with just a "meager" 50K... if some billionaire were taxed slightly more...
I'm not even talking about the vast majority of earths population that would see their life getting better with fifty bucks here and there.
I mean for me anything after the 500k mark is just going to be givin away to people or communities in need. I can live off of 500k and a job for the rest of my life.
Personally I feel like I could do more good with super PACs by supporting politicians who would help those people and communities by forcing my fellow billionaires to also contribute. I don’t like the system I find myself in, but I don’t want to throw myself into the “Yet you participate in society. Curious!” hole.
Well, lots of people could do that, but are they?
Power corrupts and all that...
I get it but I don't trust the government to ever get better so I would rather give directly to the people or directly pay their bills so they don't get hit with the taxes from the money givin to them.
You missed the point of the exercise
I didn’t answer your question in the way your script anticipated. I’m not your student.
If your script requires people to not know what they’d do with that much money, and then they do, it’s not a great rebuttal to tell them to stay on-script. That’s some Ray Comfort level rhetoric.
That said, I support far higher taxation of the wealthy. My criticism isn’t of your goal, but that your method is flawed enough to detract from it.
If you didn't get it, this is the reason:
You, and many others, use a multiplayer of 1.000 ; million, billion, trillion.
Those enormous steps exceeds human comprehension.
So use 2 instead.
Have a nice day mr grumpy!
You can't really retire off 1 mill anymore unless you are living well below your means.
I didn’t say I’d retire today, I said I’d retire 10 years earlier than my current trajectory while not changing anything else. I’d keep working and contributing to retirement.
$1M is ~$40k/year. If you have a paid off house, that's pretty reasonable. If you rent, you're going to have a hard time.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Bartlett
The best way to fathom this is to have a crippling addiction to Runescape. You can pretty much earn your first million after a week or two of play, after a certain point be able to earn few million a day. However, it can take multiple years for people to earn 1 billion gold, which is needed for some of the strongest equipment in the game.
RuneScape truly prepares you for everything in the world when it comes to financial management!
With a bit of quick math $120,000 a year over 90 years is $10,800,00 to get closer $120,000 a year over 9000 years is 1,080,000,000
You could pick about 100 people and set them up for a super financially comfortable life
I saw a post the other day, people getting mad at some ceo making 30million a year.
So in ten years they made 300mil, in 100 years the've got 3billion, after a thousand years they've made 30billion... so after like five thousand years, they'd see eye to eye with bezos...
I'm going to need eternal life to become a billionaire, and even then I'm not sure I can do it.
Me with time blindness: so about the same?
Not really.
You go from -more or less- 11 days to 11.000 days. At -say for easy numbers- 333 days a year, you get to 11.000 / 333, which is about 100/3 which is about 30, 30 days...
Back of a napkin calculations greatly help in getting a better sense of these numbers.
What?
That
It's 1000x bigger. You don't need to disseminate it. But people aren't built to grasp numbers like one thousand million. It's just too fucking big.
Except still kind of yes. To the majority of people, 11,000 days won't mean very much, but 30 years will immediately make it click.