Once in a while I flinch away from some news item as the enormity of the sums being bandied about hits me. We’ve gotten so used to seeing numbers expressed in the billions that they seem humdrum, rounding errors or petty cash outlay.
But a billion dollars is an utterly confounding amount of money. Let’s work out just how much by expressing it in familiar terms. Imagine that you have a billion dollars, and that you are spending it at the rate of $1000 a day—I think most of us can imagine that amount of money and the spending of same. Now imagine that today (May 22, 2010) is the day that you reached into your reticule and pulled out your very last $1000. You’ve run out of money, spent the entire billion at the rate of a thousand bucks a day.
Now the question: when did you start? For our purposes we will ignore items such as interest accrued or currency changes or anything like that. This is a mental experiment only.
To begin with, one billion dollars at one thousand a day: 1 billion ÷ 1 thousand = 1 million days.
And a million days, expressed in years, is easy enough: 1 million ÷ 365 = 2739 years, 266 days.
Today is the 142nd day of 2010. Therefore, you started on the 43rd day of 729 BCE.
Conclusion: if you ran out of money today, Saturday, 22 May 2010, then you began on Wednesday, 11 February 729 BCE.
And no, I have not screwed up my arithmetic. It takes almost 2740 years to spend a billion dollars at a rate of $1000 a day. Two thousand, seven hundred, and forty…YEARS.
You began your shopping spree about 25 years after Romulus founded Rome, long before the Buddha found enlightenment on the banks of the Neranja River or Pericles led the Athenians against the Persians and ushered in the golden age of Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, et al.
Come to think of it, Pericles would be as far in the future as your present self is from George Washington.
Julius Caesar wouldn’t come along for 630 years—a century longer than the span separating your present self from Christopher Columbus or Leonardo da Vinci.
And you would spend, spend, spend, one thousand dollars a day like clockwork. Rome would rise and fall, Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism and Zoroastrianism and Christianity and Islam would be founded. Charlemagne would rule and die, William the Conqueror and Philip the Fair and Alfonso the Wise ditto. The battles of Marathon, Actium, Hastings, Poitiers, Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Leyte Gulf would be fought. Sophocles and Seneca and Lao Tzu and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and Harold Robbins would write, Leonin and Machaut and Palestrina and Bach and Mozart and Elton John would compose, Michelangelo and Titian and Raphael and Leonardo and Margaret Keane would paint. Pythagoras would explore triangles, Newton would explain the natural laws that keep the universe ticking, the Wright brothers would achieve heavier-than-air flight, Rutherford and Bohr would unlock the atom, Einstein would explore Relativity, Neil Armstrong would walk on the moon, and Britney Spears would enter rehab. Wars ranging from Punic to Hundred Years to World to Cold would flare up and vanish, chieftans and kings and rajahs and presidents and prime ministers would come and go. The continents would drift about 85 feet, the length of three Cadillac Fleetwood limousines. And you would spend, spend, spend, one thousand dollars a day like clockwork.
One billion dollars: it would take the President of the United States 2,500 years to earn that much money at his present salary.
The current U.S. minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. On a 40-hour week, that comes out to $290 per week = $1160 per month = $13,920 per year. Thus 7184 years to amass a billion dollars. If you had it by now, you would have been saving 100% of your income since 5174 BCE. However, your employment choices at the beginning would have been sharply limited since most folks remained nomadic hunter-gatherers; agriculture had arisen in Egypt, Sumerian civilization had gotten under way, and if you were living in northern Europe, farming would be established within a century or so. Or you might be employed by startups in the newfangled technologies springing up around this time—clay pots in Africa and wine in Persia. Your limited options would be offset by minimal competition for jobs, given that the world population was only about 5 million—about the same as modern-day metropolitan Houston. But if you’re a fundamentalist Christian, don’t bother: according to Bishop Ussher, the Earth didn’t even exist yet so you couldn’t very well have a minimum-wage job, now could you?
If the San Francisco Conservatory of Music had a $1 billion endowment, even with restricting itself to a modest draw of 5%, the school’s annual endowment income would be $50 million dollars—more than enough to provide not only a full scholarship to every student in the school, but enough to provide free room & board as well.
Amazing amount of money, a billion dollars.
It buys us 48 hours of the current Iraq/Afghanistan war, by the way.
