To the Editor:
In Hunter Fast's recent column ("In defense of Ruth," Jan. 28), he erroneously states that the Brown endowment lost $800 billion during the financial meltdown. In fact, the endowment lost $800 million. I'm sure Fast simply made a typographical error, but I worry about the fact that this mistake was overlooked by editors. I think this is symptomatic of a larger problem: people have trouble comprehending very large numbers and the relationships between them.
Imagine a news story stating that Apple's new iPad was expected to be priced around $500,000. This would be a ridiculous and obvious error, yet it is proportionally as large as misusing billion for million. The ratio between $800 million and $800 billion is the same as the ratio between the cost of a used bicycle and the cost of a new BMW. The ratio between a million and a trillion is the same as the ratio between the cost of a gumball and the cost of a new house.
Large-number literacy is important — not just for writing annoying letters to college newspapers, but for understanding legislative proposals and economic issues. When politicians attack each other for wasteful spending, it is important to know that $5 million wasted is completely insignificant compared to something like the $787 billion stimulus bill — a pair of shoes compared to a private jet. I promise that will be the last analogy, but they surprise me every time.
And that's the problem. We aren't built to understand these orders of magnitude. Everyone has a good sense for the difference between 2 and 7, but 2 billion and 7 trillion are much harder to pin down. Still, we need to try to understand the relationships between these numbers if we are going to hold politicians accountable and have a reasonable sense of the impact of our actions.
In fact, if you counted to a million, one number a second, it would take about 11 days. If you had to count to a trillion… Never mind.
Sam Loomis '10
Feb. 1
