from an editor of the New York Times, and 'the most trusted named in journalism' Brian Williams, not to mention all the other people along the way in producing this piece who couldn't do basic math, that allowed this 'story' to make it onto the air without anyone sensing that it was off by a factor of about a million.
As an analogy, imagine someone said that “a cow that weighs 500 million milligrams could give every American more than a kilogram of meat each.” You don’t need to know that 500 million milligrams is 500 kilograms and that this clearly would not be enough to give 300 million Americans a kilo of meat apiece — you just have to have an elementary enough understanding of the world that it’s obvious a single cow cannot feed an entire country.
- One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example?
- One person could spend $1M-per-American without anything very interesting or noteworthy happening to the people taking that money in payment.
- One person could spend enough for $1M/American on a Presidential run and lose; did Hillary and Trump and the other candidates also spend that much (WOW!) or did they spend nothing by comparison and still beat Bloomberg? (also wow!).
- One Presidential run could cost so much; $1M/American is a lot more than Americans earn every year and therefore pay in tax every year, and handwaving debt away it's therefore many times more than government annual spending on everything; infrastructure, military, social services, schooling, etc. Suspiciously high.
- A million per American is in the region of 340 Trillion, several times the world's GDP.
"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman
Once net worth is that high, the majority of it seems to be attributable to stock market and other similarly intangible $, rather than $ someone has literally directly taken/earned from others. It seems unfair to expect humans to contemplate big numbers (something we're known to be bad at) by also thinking about imaginary $ as though they had a 1-for-1 tangible source.
That being said, you certainly aren't wrong to think of it this way. For example, Bezos' net worth of ~$110B / ~333M Americans = ~$333/American , which sounds like a reasonable ballpark approximation of how much _profit_ the average person has spent on Amazon + Audible + AWS + WaPo.
Thanks for giving examples of logical ways to process large numbers. These are good ways to double-check quick maths.
It’s how we end up with eggcorns. People just say things without understanding what it is they’re saying.
When your words don’t have to adhere to reality, you can end up saying some ridiculous things, and the other parrots in the room will nod and agree with you.
I feel for the math teachers out there who receive homework where a sink faucet spews 70.4 gallons of water per second.
I had always done this, but I remember hitting a word problem in calculus where the calculation came back with something that made no intuitive sense. I remember staring at it and re-tracing each step before turning it in, certain that I had have made a mistake, but unable to find a problem. It turned out that nothing was wrong, the values just weren't real-world consistent.
This didn't stop them from using the gravitational constant provided in the assignment or from getting the correct answer even, but it was funny regardless.
tl;dr: mentally we take off "millions" as a unit, do the calculation, then add "millions" back on. This works for addition, subtraction, and inequality but fails for multiplication and division.