July 18, 2019
Q: What’s the difference between a million and a billion ?
A: Long story short: a factor of a thousand.
Since it is now popular to refer to anyone with an ungodly amount of money as a billionaire, it comes to our attention that many Americans think a billion dollars is somewhat more than a million, but just the next level, with a “b” rather than an “m.”
No, no no. We have a number for the next level: we call it ten million and on up to ninety-nine million. And for the level after that we also have a name. We call that one a hundred million. And, you guessed it, you can have up to 9.999 of those.
A billion is ten hundred million or, as the British so wisely called it back when such numbers seemed more unimaginable than quotidian, a thousand million.
So, when a tech divorcee recently announced that she is going to divest half (50%, oh my) of her wealth, reducing it from about $37B to about $18B, we might consider such generosity in the light of the fact that this will leave her with a mere eighteen thousand million dollars or, put another way, one hundred and eighty hundred million dollars, down from three hundred and seventy hundred million. Well, 37,000 million dollars was just too much anyway.
Good people, we are not doing ourselves any favors by swapping out the m with a b and shortening the number up for the sake of a convenient moniker (this is sort of the inverse of how we’re marketed 1000 milligram tablets of Vitamin C because 1 gram just seems like so much less). There’s something happening here, as the song goes, and it’s clearer if we spell out the actual degrees of difference.
MOE
M.I.C.H – Modernity, Intelligence, Complexity, Humanity