Visualizing a trillion

[snousle]

This is kind of alarming:

The Econ4u folks are dedicated to education Americans about all matters financial. To dramatize the importance of their mission, they put a poll into the field asking people how many millions are in a trillion. The results:

Q: How many times larger is a trillion than a million? Would you say…

One Thousand Times- 18%
Ten Thousand Times- 12%
One Hundred Thousand Times- 21%
One Million Times- 21%
Ten Million Times- 17%
Don’t Know- 12%


The correct answer is a million millions are in a trillion. But 79 percent of Americans got that wrong. And almost everyone got it wrong downward.

LOL. I was just thinking lately about ways to visualize a trillion.

Imagine a very small pebble, or alternately a large grain of sand, one millimeter on a side. (That's about 1/25th of an inch.)

If you place them side by side along the edge of a typical office desk, you have about a thousand pebbles.

If you completely cover the surface of the desk, you have about a million pebbles.

If you completely fill the volume of the desk, you have about a billion pebbles.

If you completely fill a 3,000 square foot home up to the very peak of the roof, you have about a trillion pebbles.

It's a big number, but not so big that you can't relate it to familiar objects.

Incidentally, it's also (very) roughly the total number of pixels in an uncompressed, high-resolution, feature length film.

Comments

One, Two, Three, Many...

[bigjohnsf.livejournal.com]

I don't think anyone can really conceive of the difference between one billion dollars and one trillion dollars. I think the only way anyone can have any concept of what those amounts mean is relative and contextual.

What I find disturbing is... some, many of the people who answered that question incorrectly have college degrees, I daresay some of them graduate degrees. And, yet, I am a high-school dropout, and I knew the answer.

Yay me.

[westwind-mv.livejournal.com]

One thing that helps me get across large-scale values is to put them into the mix with really small-scale values. The dynamic tension helps bring things into scale.

For instance, I ask people to think of a tube 1 square Ångstrom in cross-section by 5 light-years long. The volume of that tube is exactly 1.000 pint. Somehow the apposition of opposites helps communicate the point, especially (as in this example) if you can bring the result into human scale.

[broduke2000.livejournal.com]

No one has ever said that they love me 1 trillion times.
No one has ever offered me 1 trillion kisses.

Sigh

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

all of my economic blogs have been lighting up with the 'visualize a trillion' thing for a little while- it burns my cheese, that the beggars weren't paying any mind at all at all when the first trillion or so was being spent....

Re: Sigh

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Most attempts, though, are deliberately obfuscating - a stack of dollar bills that would reach the moon, that sort of thing. Most represent an effort to make the number unimaginably large, whereas I'm trying to bring it back into the realm of the imaginable.

The most effective way of dealing with the number is to think of it in per-capita terms: a trillion is about $3300 per person in the US. Of course, framing the Iraq war that way made it seem alarmingly inexpensive, another example of why most visualization efforts actually aim for confusion.

[moofedct.livejournal.com]

I got that one wrong, but it's early. Sure gave me an idea as to scale.

[jstregyr.livejournal.com]

Reading the original Econ4u page, it appears they did not take further information from their 1001 adults to stratify the population surveyed. I would have loved to know how much smaller the fraction of the correct answer gets if you prune out scientists and those individuals who routinely use scientific notation in their work.

[1ticor.livejournal.com]

Another example with visuals:
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html