Anthony Galace is the director of health equity at the Greenlining Institute.

*****

Our brains don’t really work so well with

very small or very large numbers. If I ask you to imagine the distance from

earth to the sun, from earth to the nearest star, or earth to the nearest

galaxy, it’s tempting to just think very, very far in all three cases, even

though each one is millions of times more than the previous one.

Similarly, if you try to imagine the size

of a bacterium, a virus, or an atom, you’re probably just thinking very small,

even though each of those is millions of times smaller than the previous one.

For that reason it’s hard to get our heads around some of the statistics that

are important for the way the world works. It’s hard even to imagine the

difference between a million and a billion, there are a few illustrations out

there, but I like this one. Imagine you won a million dollars in the lottery,

and you decided to go on a shopping spree. You spend $1,000 per day – how long

will your money last? Answer: less than three years. Obviously I’m ignoring interest

and inflation here.

This podcast is coming out on Monday,

September 23, 2019. If you had won that million and started your $1,000-a-day shopping

spree on Christmas day 2016, you would have run out of money last Saturday.

But what if you had won a billion dollars?

If you were spending it at the same rate, $1000 a day, to run out of money about

now, you would need to start spending, not years ago, not decades ago, not

centuries ago but thousands of years ago. About 718 BC, to be exact. To finish

spending a billion dollars, at the rate of $1000 a day you would have to have

started while the Pharaohs ruled Egypt, before ancient Rome was even founded.

That gives you a just an idea of the

difference in scale between a million dollars and a billion dollars.

And I think that the reason that many

people don’t react proportionately sometimes is because our brains can’t re...