A New Leaf

Billion Dollar Gram

Billions of dollars are hard to imagine. Expand your mind, then, with this remarkable illustration which manages to put these vast sums in perspective. Especially well done is the careful layout of fortunes, encouraging comparisons between unrelated items. For example, the internet porn industry is roughly the size of foreign aid given by large countries. And “Feed every child in the world for a year” is slightly less than the sum of “Beijing Olympics” and “Video Games Market.”

Some numbers seem startlingly small, in the grand scheme of things: “Save the Amazon” at $21 billion is only a bit bigger than “Yoga Industry” at $18 billion.

But the headline comparison, in my mind – even more important than the enormous looming yellow square representing the losses associated with the financial crisis – is this:

• $465 billion: Feed and educate every child on Earth for 5 years.
• $3,000 billion: Iraq war estimated total.

Of course, this seems like an absurd trade-off until you see the “Iraq War (predicted cost 2003)” is “only” $60 billion. The lesson, it seems, is that the predicted cost of a war could be off by a factor of 50. To say nothing of the trade-offs made with human lives, war is a risky bet for a government to take; perhaps riskier even than bank bailouts and stimulus plans.