By Morf Morford, Tacoma Daily Index

Ignorance about math is something most Americans take for granted. Some even wear that ignorance proudly. As with everything else, our ignorance can cost us dearly.

But even more than the relationship between numbers (which is what math actually is), numbers themselves can be confusing, if not disorienting.

I spent too many years teaching English grammar and basic math. I think it something like a toss-up as to which one of those is the least valued, less respected and most of all, a lost cause to advocate for.

But as much as most us might choose to ignore and avoid both of them, they are both essential to communicating, defining and evaluating what matters to us.

Millions & Billions

Many of us, for example, use the terms “millions” and “billions” almost interchangeably. And I often hear them used without any bearing on, or reference to reality at all.

How many times have you heard some one say “I told you a million times!” when they only meant, perhaps five or six times? We often use “million” when we just mean “a lot”.

But how much is a million, anyway?

Let’s think about time as a way to think about millions – and billions. Not days. Or hours. Or even minutes. How many is a million seconds?

But I’ll start simpler; there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. That means about 86,400 seconds in a day. Not even close to a million. Or even half a million.

One thousand seconds is just short of 17 minutes. A million seconds is about 11 and a half days.

A million, after all, is one thousand thousands (also known as 1,000,000).

If you see movies made in the 1930s or 1940s, you might see business leaders (or crime bosses) talk about money that way.

A billion is NOT the next decimal (that would be ten million), or even numerical point after a million. It wouldn’t even be a hundred million – it would be the next thousand multiplier – 1,000,000,000 – otherwise known as one thousand millions.

How many seconds in year?

If we multiply the number of seconds per day (86,400) by the number of days in a year (365) we get a total for how many seconds per year — 31,536,000. Not even close to a billion. Or even half a billion. Or even a third of a billion.

A billion seconds is about 31.7 years or 31 years and 255 days.

Depending on which day you do these calculations, one billion seconds ago was sometime in 1991 (assuming you are in 2023).

Again, the leap from million to billion is a thousand-fold. The same is true of the next leap – a thousand billion is a trillion. In other words, a trillion seconds is a thousand times more than a billion seconds – which means that a billion seconds is about 32 years and a trillion seconds is about 32,000 years.

A typical human lifespan is a bit more than two billion seconds. Keep that in mind as you embark on your next video binge.

Hours

To put it a little more simply, one thousand hours translates into 41 days and 16 hours. One million hours is one thousand times more; 41,666 days – more than 114 years. In other words, few, if any of us, will live one million hours.

One billion hours is one thousand times that number. You can do the math.

Dollars

We might hear the terms millions and billions in the context of money in our media and conversations.

Millions and billions of dollars is even more abstract.

As a thought experiment, imagine if someone gave you one thousand dollars a day (tax-free) every day for a year. That would be ten crisp Benjamins each morning. About thirty thousand dollars a month, and 365 thousand dollars a year.

Not even half a million dollars.

A million dollars (in hundred dollar bills) would make a good-sized pile of cash – it would fill a full-sized paper grocery bag. A billion dollars would be a thousand grocery bags of hundred dollar bills.

In other words, to acquire a billion dollars in a year, you’d have to take in almost three million dollars a day.

A million dollars a day would bring in about thirty million dollars a month, and 365 million dollars a year – far less than half a billion dollars.

To “earn” a billion dollars is, to put it mildly, a challenge – but somehow over three thousand people world wide have done it – a little over one thousand of them in North America and almost a thousand in Europe. There are about 900 billionaires in Asia and about 200 in the Middle East.

For whatever reason, 2021 and 2022 have led to increasing those numbers dramatically.

For those of us who work (as opposed to inheriting wealth), we would have to “earn” (and keep) a little over $100,000 an hour (24 hours a day) or about $400,000 an hour for a standard eight hour work day to make that in one year.

Hmmm…maybe I should ask for a raise…