What’s the difference between a Million and a Billion?
About a BillionPractically a rounding error.
Came here to post this.
I have a theory about this: We group money in magnitudes of tens up to a million but then jump up from 10x to 1,000x:
1
10
100
1,000
10,000
100,000
1,000,000
1,000,000,000
That’s a huge increase but our minds like patterns so we instinctively feel that a billion must be about 10x a million and not the 1,000x it really is, thus leading to huge inaccuracies.
Much of our perception is logarithmic, which is predictable, since patterns occur from proportion of quantities. Absolute quantities are meaningless in themselves. Even ten dollars as a quantity is meaningless except through prior experience understanding the value of a single dollar. Every value except the smallest is tenfold greater than some other value of at least some consequence.
I don’t really understand your initial assumption. What if someone has 10 million dollars? Would you say he has 0.01 billion?
I think that your theory has some merit, but I believe it’s more apparent when we describe the people who own the money, as opposed to the money itself: A millionaire will stay a (multi)millionaire until they become a billionaire.
I think the idea is that we still think of someone who has >1 million but <1 billion as having some number of millions of dollars, rather than subdividing “millions” into “millions,” “tens of millions,” and “hundreds of millions.” Of course we do subdivide that when we’re being particular about how incredibly rich some actor is or something, but generally they all fall on the same order of magnitude in our minds.
Correct
That’s my point. We (those of us that aren’t at least millionaires) don’t really differentiate in society between someone that has a million dollars and someone that has 10 million dollars; they’re both stuck in the “millionaires” tier.
So say you are making $50,000 a year, well it’s easy to see how you or someone like you could (theoretically) get to $100,000; that’s just the next tier up. And then it’s easy to imagine someone going from $100,000 to a million because that’s the next tier up again. But once you get there, people don’t tend to think of ten million as a tier and usually not a hundred million either. The next tier in our zeitgeist after million is billion.
So people tend to think of billion being kind of the same as going from $100,000 to $1,000,000. Hence the common disconnect about just how much more money a billionaire has than the common man.
People don’t have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger one thousand is than one.
One second is one second.
One thousand seconds is like 15 minutes idk it’s not very intuitive.
Anyway, it’s about a thousand times bigger.
Hope this helps.
I should find some better hobbies.
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I like to think of $1 billion in terms of how much money you need to spend. Let’s say you’re given $1 billion at birth, never earn another cent in your life, and live for exactly 75 years. To spend all of that money, you’d need to spend $36,500 per day, every day, for your entire life. Even then, you’d have nearly a million dollars left to pass down to your children.
It feels elusive how anyone could spend so much, but controlling the content of mass media has been of great service for the interests of the Kochs and the Wilkses.
The difference between one million and one billion is almost exactly one billion.
Within a margin of error of 0.1%
At a modest average annual dividend yield of 4%, $1 million in investments will generate $40,000 in income. $1 billion will generate $40,000,000.
For real. Once you are a billionaire, with even the most basic investments, you have to try REAL hard to become broke again. Spare money begets money. Spare dragon hoards begets dragon hoards. Any bitch baby billionaire whining about taxes can kiss every single asshole of single working parents, people struggling to cover student loan debts, people who perpetually rent because they can’t afford a home with a lower mortgage payment than there rent is, and every person who got ill and lost there job and home as a result. They don’t need more dragon hoards. They’ll be just fine.
Hot damn that is a good way to contextualize it.
This is the best way to explain it I’ve seen. Tell me those billionaires are struggling 🙄
That’s how multiplication by 1000 works
What’s funny is millionaires arguing against tax increases on the right when they are much closer to the pleb than they are from the billionaires that are the ones who would really pay the price.
Once you reach a certain point of greed, nothing is ever enough money. That’s why they need to be made illegal. They are literaly economic cancer.
I had a dream this week that I won 2 billions somehow in a lottery. I had so many headaches thinking about all the friends etc… and how to give the millions away to all of them and family. And these guys are storing them like a dragon and it’s gold.
TIL I’m 1 billion seconds old
If second were money, I’d be worth a hell of a lot more than a billion. And I’d be richer than a lot of tech bros.
If you had invested your time at the gray men but you didn’t
A bank account with one million dollars can be completely wiped at any time. This could happen by American healthcare cost due to illness or an accident, or a lawsuit from something like a handyman slipping on your property. A billion dollars wouldn’t even feel it.
By some measures, Musk’s decisions managing Twitter/X should earn him one million lifetimes of homelessness.
I know no one personally who would remain secure after losing billions of dollars, yet I keep hearing that owners take all the risks and workers are always protected from hardship.
With all the layoffs we see, that is fucking bullshit. The workers get shafted even when they are doing a good job because of dumb fucks c-suite gambling the company on bullshit technology, or simple cutting costs for the shareholders.
Arguably, housing should be accessible without toiling to make a rich person less unhappy and more wealthy.
This helped me a lot https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
There’s a Tom Scott video where he illustrates the difference between a million USD and a billion USD, expressed as the size of a stack of 1 dollar bills.
A million was about the size of a football field and a less than two minute walk.
A billion took him from somewhere near London all the way to the east coast, and had him drive for over an hour.
One million years ago some of our more advanced ancestors walked the earth
One billion years ago multicellular life having evolved yet is debated
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What blows my mind is is that astronomers work with numbers incomprehensible to the human mind every day. Of course, they can calculate them, but to comprehend what a trip to our nearest galaxy would be like? Pretty damn difficult. What it would be like to travel from one end of the known universe to the other? Our fragile minds just can’t take in numbers of that magnitude.
