Comments on: Talking about Health Care (and Trillions) http://dmarron.com/2009/11/10/talking-about-health-care-and-trillions/ Musings on Economics, Finance, and Life Thu, 24 May 2012 19:06:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Piperdoc http://dmarron.com/2009/11/10/talking-about-health-care-and-trillions/#comment-1374 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:03:07 +0000 http://dmarron.com/?p=2100#comment-1374 http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/one-trillion-dollars-video/

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

This may help.

]]> By: Mike Waters http://dmarron.com/2009/11/10/talking-about-health-care-and-trillions/#comment-1368 Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:21:06 +0000 http://dmarron.com/?p=2100#comment-1368 Donald, I think the best way to help people conceive of these numbers is to use temporal parallels:

A thousand seconds ago was almost 17 minutes ago.
A million seconds ago was 11 1/2 days ago.
A billion seconds ago (almost 32y) Jimmy Carter was President.

And a trillion seconds ago?

The earliest Egyptian pyramids were still over 25,000 years in the future.

(For some reason, I think the human brain grasps units of time far more easily than other types of measure.)

Hope this helps!

Mike

]]> By: korok ray http://dmarron.com/2009/11/10/talking-about-health-care-and-trillions/#comment-1362 Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:52:17 +0000 http://dmarron.com/?p=2100#comment-1362 donald, nice video. two years ago the media ran many pieces like “what you could do with $1.2 trillion when estimates of the cost of the iraq war came out. (google what could you do with one trillion dollars). e.g. buy every kid in the world an ipod, pave US highways in gold, buy a buick for every senior citizen, etc. many of those examples still fit this year’s deficit numbers.

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