How much is fifteen trillion?
Not to mention any names, but I understand a large country now has a national debt of over 15 trillion dollars (US). You probably know the country. It is the one who is now counseling Spain, Italy, and Greece on how to handle their debt. 
Well, maybe that's not too bad. Maybe if we all chipped in, we could pay down the debt. So I decided to run some numbers.
Many of you on the forum are much better with mathematics, so maybe you can help me. I heard, a couple of weeks ago, that the population of the earth is now over 7 billion people. If every person in the world (man, woman, child) contributed $1,000 US, we could pay a little less than half the debt.
Wow.
Okay, that didn't work out very well. I also heard there are more people alive today than have lived in recorded history (up to the current, I suppose, or we'd be stuck in one of those mathematical loops). Anyway, if every human that is living now or has ever lived would chip in $1,000 US, we could almost pay off the debt of this unnamed nation.
When I was a boy in a rural, agricultural society, I learned two important lessons. Neither probably translates well into Spanish. First, clean up your own back yard. Second, don't spend more than you earn.
3 Answers
Let's not forget that words like "billion" and "trillion" mean different things in different places.
In English - or in the US at any rate, a "billion" means 1,000,000,000. A thousand million.
En Spanish, that figure is either "mil millones", or "un millardo".
Likewise, in Spanish, "Un billón" is "a million-million" Wait - but that's what in in the US we call "a trillion"!
Right. So what's "Un trillón" in Spanish? A un millón de billones (a million trillion, in the US).
So keeping track of these extravagantly large numbers is even more nightmarish when you try to think about them in different languages!
And 80% of the world is as likely to see 1000 dollars worth of money with their own eyes as I am likely to see 15 trillion.
It's terrifying how dependent economies are on imaginary money, it's like when we played poker when we were kids and we ran out of chips so we used pieces of string and pencils and whatever else we could find to represent chips, and then you ran out of stuff and you had to do it all in your head or say that the green chips were now worth more than they were before, so a green chip is now worth 10 green chips but what you actually have is 1 green chip..(but you know in your head that really you have 10 green chips) and your friend owes you 100 (10000) green chips even though the poker set only came with 20.
