How Not To Imagine Big Piles Of Things
This website is making the rounds in a few of my circles, and it frustrates me. Numbers ending in "-illion" and require context, but visualizations comparing giant things to other giant things seem unproductive or counterproductive. Visualizing the size of a stack of $100 bills representing "US unfunded liabilities" is meaningless without a similar visualization of the size of the American population, or the size of American assets or GDP, or anything that actually contextualizes that figure against what's important. The Economist's global public debt clock shows a really big number - $39 trillion - but the world population is 6.7 billion which works out to about $5800 per person. I might say that's not a big number, and you might say that number doesn't represent that the debt is borne unequally in populations more or less able to pay for it. And that's the point that we ought to be discussing - a useful context for the problem, not just blowing our minds by imagining big piles of things.
Aside: I'm not sure where that website's 114.5 trillion figure representing "US unfunded liabilities" is coming from, when the US public debt is more like $14t, which works out to $47,751 per person. Which makes the government look pretty responsible, since this is a good sight less than what those people owe on their cars and houses.
Aside: I'm not sure where that website's 114.5 trillion figure representing "US unfunded liabilities" is coming from, when the US public debt is more like $14t, which works out to $47,751 per person. Which makes the government look pretty responsible, since this is a good sight less than what those people owe on their cars and houses.