It has been bothering me that I have no concept of just how big $700 billion is. I’m lousy at math, but I decided to play around a bit to see if I could somehow tame this outrageous sounding number so I could visualize it or gain a sense of it. Here’s what I came up with:
The current U.S. population is approximately 305,292,874. If we all – every man, woman, and child – split the $700 billion evenly, we’d each get around $2,293.00.
The current world population is approximately 6,726,870,693. Again, if we divided the $700 billion among every man, woman, and child on Earth, each would receive about $104.00.
Scientists believe the earth to be approximately 4.5 billion years old. If someone had stashed $155 under a rock each year since the Big Bang or Creation, whichever is your cup of tea, we’d have about $700 billion just in time to solve the current financial crisis.
A $1 bill is 6.125″ in length. If we had 700 billion of them, they would stretch around the earth 2,717 times in a continuous pile nearly a foot high.
700 billion $1 bills end to end would stretch almost 3/4 of the way to the sun.
The English translation of War and Peace contains over 560,000 words. We’d need to collect 1,250,000 copies of the novel to reach 700 billion words.
Or how about this…
A 5 pound Hershey Chocolate Bar is 1″ thick. If we stacked 700 billion newly minted $1 bills in one amazing pile, we’d need to stack approximately 3,010,001 five pound Hershey Chocolate Bars to reach the same height as our pile of bills.
The average human head has about 100,000 strands of hair. If each hair were worth 7 million dollars the whole shebang would go for $700 billion.
This is making my head hurt.
If anyone has a better way to make this number make sense, please chime in.
If you want to correct my math, go for it. If, on the other hand, you want to debate the math, reread the second sentence of this post and then go get a life.
Which is apparently what I need to do.
4 comments
Daughter says:
September 30, 2008 at 8:45 am (UTC -5)
Alternatively, 1 billion children in the world live below the poverty line. Depending on whose statistics you read, $7 billion could feed *every single one* of those children for about *14* years.
Or it could, you know, cushion the egos of rich business people who can’t handle the consequences of the risks they took. Whichever.
Dona says:
September 30, 2008 at 5:25 pm (UTC -5)
My head hurts now too. I need to go put it back in the sand where I usually leave it.
Donas last blog post..The Graveyard Book
Daughter says:
September 30, 2008 at 6:11 pm (UTC -5)
I can’t believe you put me on the spam list…
Anyway, the comment you *deleted* was correcting $7 billion to $700 billion.
Tina says:
October 4, 2008 at 6:44 pm (UTC -5)
Laura, you are so right! Thanks for visiting…I’m looking forward to checking out your site.