I like words. I enjoy hooking lots of words together in a row in order to tell stories or paint vivid word pictures. Sometimes, if I am not careful, I will use a word that expresses a general concept or an emotional pulse I feel that I want to express. But the word I choose to use may not have anything to do with precision or reality. For example: if I want to express how prolific a mother rabbit can be, in regard to birthing babies, I might say, “The highly emotional, black and white belted mother rabbit had just given birth to scads of irresistible, fuzzy, little bunnies.” Well, what the hecky is a scad?
Or, I might be trying to describe the size of the crowd of people at the evening concert by saying, “The old concert hall was packed to the rafters with a huge bunch of well-dressed party folks.” Well, what the hecky is a huge bunch? It is a concept with no precision.
During my lifetime, I would say that one of the words our culture continues to use with almost no precision at all is the word “trillion.” We say, “There were a trillion stars in the August night sky” or, “there are a trillion places on this earth I want to visit before I die” or, “the picnic table was covered with a trillion flies.” It is a concept with no precision.
One woman’s answer, when asked to explain a “trillion” was that in the old days a very wealthy person was called a “millionaire” then, there became so many millionaires that they started to designate the really rich as “billionaires.” But now, they are not really all that special, so they’ve come up with the phrase “trillionaires” for the new up and coming group! " She really had no foggy idea of the precise meaning or value of the word “trillion.”
Perhaps, now is a good time to do a reality check regarding the concept and the precise meaning of the term “trillion.” Quite glibly, we could rattle off that one trillion is a thousand billion, or we could say that a trillion is a million million, or we could say that it is a “1” followed by twelve zeros – which would be written out as: 1,000,000,000,000. But what is it really? I have trouble getting my mind wrapped around the precision of the concept.
In 1982 my first economic textbook was published. I included in the book a graph showing the US Federal Debt. From the beginning of our country in 1776, it had taken us 206 years of numerous and expensive wars, economic recessions, a major economic depression, FDR’s “New Deal”, Eisenhower’s building of the Interstate Highway System crisscrossing the country, Kennedy’s “New Frontier”, the unbelievably expensive NASA space program, Johnson’s “Great Society” then, the “War on Poverty”, Vietnam, Nixon’s taking us off the “Gold Standard” etc., etc. . . . and we had still not reached the “one trillion debt mark.” It took until about 1987 for us to reach the trillion-dollar national debt designation. Now, they tell us that we are somewhere around the 28 trillion debt number!
Just in the past several weeks we have added somewhere in the neighborhood of another 6 trillion dollars to that debt. So what? “What the Hecky is a Trillion Dollars?”
At my financial seminars, I tried to help the attendees get a clearer and more realistic understanding of the concept of a trillion dollars. Here’s what we did.
I told them to picture in their minds their favorite teller at their favorite bank. They were to go to the Teller’s window and ask that they please count out to you “one million dollars in one-dollar bills at the rate of one dollar per . . . one, two, three, four, five, etc. Neither of you at the window could stop for lunch, take potty breaks, meals or sleep. It had to be straight through. You could sip your Starbucks through a straw. No stopping!
How long would it take, without stopping, for the teller to count out to you one million dollars - one second at a time? The answer is: eleven-and one-half days (11 ½ days).
Now, as soon as the both of you are rested up and well-fed, it is time for the next project. Go back to the Teller's window - only this time the teller is to count out to you one billion dollars in one-dollar bills at the rate of one dollar per second . . . one, two, three, four, five, etc. Neither of you at the window could stop for lunch, take a potty break, meals, or sleep. It had to be straight through. You could sip your Starbucks through a straw - but no stopping!
How long would it take, without stopping, for the teller to count out to you one billion dollars – one second at a time? The answer is: right at 32 years!
After the previous 32-year project involvement, your favorite teller at your favorite bank will probably not still be working at the bank. So, you will probably need to go to a different window and get a different teller to help you with this next project:– only this time the new teller is to count out to you one trillion dollars in one-dollar bills at the rate of one dollar per second . . . one, two, three, four, five, etc. Neither of you at the window could stop for lunch, take potty breaks, meals, or sleep. It had to be straight through. You could sip your Starbucks through a straw – but no stopping! (Probably Starbucks would also be out of business by then.)
How long would it take, without stopping, for the teller to count out to you one trillion dollars – one second at a time? Are you ready for this? Nearly 32,000 years! That’s longer than all recorded history. (The actual number is: (1012 sec) (3.16 x 107 sec/yr) = 31,546 years!)
Oops! Now we’ve started to lose reality again, because we have a hard time getting our minds around the reality and precision of 32,000 years.
The six trillion amount that has just recently been added to the debt would take you 189,276 years to count out in the same fashion. Would you now like to add that new six trillion to our already unhinged current US Federal Debt of 28 Trillion, just to help you become more aware of precision and reality? No, thank you – my brain is too tired.
I just might be tempted to go back to using disconnected concepts like, “scads of bunnies” and “huge bunches of concert goers” . . . What the Hecky!