Does anyone really understand how much a billion dollars is? My high-school physics professor has a webpage dedicated to this question. But I wanted to rattle on about it here.
From a recent Yahoo article about new “star wars” style defense systems Bush is implementing:
“Erecting such a defense shield is the Pentagon’s single most expensive development program, likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over coming decades.”
I personally believe that most people can’t conceptualize a million dollars, let alone a billion. (In American and modern British usage, 1 million = 1,000,000; one billion = 1,000,000,000). Supposedly, most people would conceptualize a billion as either two million, or ten million. Most calculators won’t go higher than 99 million (8 digits). Most people who win $1 million or more spend it all and are broke within the first two years (oh, sorry, that’s another rant).
But let’s give it a try. The most expensive things most people will ever purchase are a car and a house.
You can get a fine car these days for around $25,000. For $1m, you could buy nice cars for 40 of your family and closest friends. For $1B, forty thousand. Land Rover (of couse you knew I was going to mention that!) sells around 25 thousand vehicles in the US per year; but they’re a bit more than $25,000 so you could buy about one whole year’s worth of all the Rovers sold in the US (can you save one for me?). Times 100: Missile defense system, or the entire US production of automobiles for a year?
Let’s say a brand-new house costs $250,000 dollars. Four houses cost $1m. Four thousand houses are $1B. For the cost of a $100B defense shield we could build 400,000 houses (or probably more like one or two million, if you count economies of scale) – about enough to hold a million people. In a third-world country, let’s say we could build a comfortable dwelling and provide a lifetime’s worth of food, for $10,000 per person (probably a lot less than that). Missile defense system, or food and housing for ten million people, for life?
Assuming you make around $1000 a week, $50,000 a year – a great salary! In 20 years you’d have made a million dollars – thirty years, after taxes. It would take THIRTY THOUSAND YEARS for you to make a billion dollars. Thirty thousand years ago is roughly when humans began to roam the earth. Missile defense system: three million man-years at $50,000/year (including taxes).
There are some 300 million people in the US. Roughly one in three are paying taxes. The missile defense system will cost each of these taxpayers $1000.
Isn’t there some way we could fight this economically instead of militarily? I know – let’s create some absolute boondoggle mechanical device – something that doesn’t do anything at all (of course I’m not referring to the missile defense system itself!). Budget $100B on it, and then subcontract it out to the axis of evil countries under the condition that they will cease all weapons production and be friendly towards the US. Sure, you can call it a bribe.
If I’ve slipped a digit anywhere in these calculations, don’t bother to tell me, because that’s my point anyway.
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Build a multi-billion dollar weapons system and point it at him, and…he’ll probably resent you even more for not just sharing your fish with him in the first place.