Ever notice small children don't really understand numbers? I gave my nephew a pretzel and he told me he didn't want just one, he wanted five pretzels. So I broke up the one pretzel he had into five pieces and had him count with me to five. He was happy he now had five pretzels.
Studies have found that behavior never leaves us; it just happens at larger numbers for adults. Numbers get so big we don't relate to the differences between millions, billions and trillions. Those are just words and zeroes.
This first image is a man standing in front of $1 million dollars in $100 dollar bills. The second image is of the man standing in front of $100 million of $100 dollar bills stacked on a pallet. If we related to these numbers accurately, we'd be 100 times more happy as we were with the $1 million and most people don't react that differently between the two numbers.
Our government now tosses around the trillion figure. The third image is $1 trillion in $100 bills stacked in pallets. Can you even see the man in the lower left corner of those double stacked pallets? The difference between a million and a trillion is the difference between a small pile of money and a warehouse filled with money, yet most of us react to these numbers about the same.
The next time you hear about the cost of a program or trade deficit expressed in trillions, think about these images.
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