Word: personent
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Seriously, what is it? To the average person, a number that big probably doesn't mean much. At some point long before the hundred-billion-dollar mark, large numbers simply become figures on the page, well beyond human scale and intuitive understanding. And yet as discussion about the economy and the impressive numbers that come along with it continue to dominate the news, it may be more important than ever to try to understand. Is a $700 billion financial-industry bailout a lot? Is a $775 billion economic-stimulus package enough? (See the worst business deals...
...Paulos started counting seats along the first-base line. Multiplying the number of seats in a row by the number of rows, Paulos came up with a section of the stadium that he figured contained about 10,000 seats - an image he can now think back to whenever a person starts talking about tens of thousands of a particular thing. When numbers get too large, though, that method breaks down. A stack of one trillion $1 bills would reach more than a quarter of the way to the moon - replacing one incomprehensible thought with another doesn't do much good...
...next move on to more formal manipulations. When trying to comprehend a trillion-dollar deficit, you might calculate how much money that represents per person in the U.S. One trillion dollars divided by 300 million Americans comes out to $3,333. Then you search for a useful comparison. A convenient - though perhaps unsettling - comparison is to the amount of credit-card debt carried by the average person in this country. That figure is $3,245. "So a good way of thinking about government debt financing is that it's similar to what the average person is doing," says Camerer...
...developing world, but by coming to the U.S. Grameen is taking on a different sort of challenge: one of the planet's richest countries. Yes, money may be tight in the waning recession, but this is still a nation of 100,000 bank branches. (See TIME's 2009 Person of the Year: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke...
...TIME's Person of the Year, People Who Mattered and more...