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.
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Re: Sigh
Date: 2009-05-05 05:43 pm (UTC)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.