That’s fascinating and I’m super curious: when precisely, in your experience as a participant in a language community did it feel like “The American definition where a billion is 10^9 and a trillion is 10^12 has long since taken over”?
((I’d heard about the British system, and I had appreciated how it makes the the “bil”, “tril”, “quadril”, “pentil” prefixes of all the “-illion” words make much more sense as “counting how many 10^6 chunks were being multiplied together”.
The American system makes it so that you’re “counting how many thousands are being multiplied together”, but you’re starting at 1 AFTER the first thousand, so there’s “3 thousands in a billion” and “4 thousands in a trillion”, and so on… with a persistent off-by-one error all the way up...
Mathematically, there’s a system that makes more sense and is simpler to teach in the British way, but linguistically, the American way lets you speak and write about 50k, 50M, 50B, 50T, 50Q, and finally 50P (for fifty pentillion)...
...and that linguistic frame is probably going to get more and more useful as inflation keeps inflating?
Eventually the US national debt will probably be “in the quadrillions of paper dollars” (and we’ll NEED the word in regular conversation by high status people talking about the well being of the country)...
...and yet (presumably?) the debt-to-gdp ratio will never go above maybe 300% (not even in a crisis?) because such real world crises or financial gyrations will either lead to massive defaults, or renominalization (maybe go back to metal for a few decades?), or else the government will go bankrupt and not exist to carry those debts, or something “real” will happen.
Fundamentally, the ratio of debt-to-gdp is “real” in a way that the “monetary unit we use to talk about our inflationary script” is not. There are many possible futures where all countries on Earth slowly eventually end up talking about “pentillions of money units” without ever collapsing, whereas debt ratios are quite real and firm and eventually cause the pain that they imply will arrive...
One can see in teh graph below how these numbers mostly “clustering together because annual-interest-rates and debt-to-gdp-ratios are directly and meaningfully comparable and constrained by the realities of sane financial reasoning” much more clearly when you show debt ratios, over time, internationally...
...you can see in that data that Japan, Greece, and Israel are in precarious places, just with your eyeballs in that graph with nicely real units.
Then the US, the UK, Portugal, Spain, France, Canada, and Belgium are also out into the danger zone with debt well above 100% of GDP, where we better have non-trivial population growth and low government spending for a while, or else we could default in a decade or two.
A small part of me wonders if “the financial innumeracy of the median US and UK voter” are part of the explanation for why we are in the danger zone, and not seeming to react to it in any sort of sane way, as part of the zeitgeist of the English speaking world?
For both of our governments, they “went off the happy path” (above 100%) right around 2008-2011, due to the Great Recession. So it would presumably be some RECENT change that switched us from “financial prudence before” and then “financial imprudence afterwards”?
Maybe it is something boring and obvious like birthrates and energy production?
For reference, China isn’t on wikipedia’s graph (maybe because most of their numbers are make believe and its hard to figure out what’s going on there for real?) but it is plausible they’re “off the top of the chart” at this point. Maybe Xi and/or the CCP are innumerate too? Or have similar “birthrate and energy” problems? Harder to say for them, but the indications are that, whatever the cause, their long term accounting situation is even more dire.
Looping all the way back, was it before or after the Great Recession, in your memory, that British speakers de facto changed to using “billion” to talk about 10^9 instead of 10^12?))
That’s fascinating and I’m super curious: when precisely, in your experience as a participant in a language community did it feel like “The American definition where a billion is 10^9 and a trillion is 10^12 has long since taken over”?
((I’d heard about the British system, and I had appreciated how it makes the the “bil”, “tril”, “quadril”, “pentil” prefixes of all the “-illion” words make much more sense as “counting how many 10^6 chunks were being multiplied together”.
The American system makes it so that you’re “counting how many thousands are being multiplied together”, but you’re starting at 1 AFTER the first thousand, so there’s “3 thousands in a billion” and “4 thousands in a trillion”, and so on… with a persistent off-by-one error all the way up...
Mathematically, there’s a system that makes more sense and is simpler to teach in the British way, but linguistically, the American way lets you speak and write about 50k, 50M, 50B, 50T, 50Q, and finally 50P (for fifty pentillion)...
...and that linguistic frame is probably going to get more and more useful as inflation keeps inflating?
Eventually the US national debt will probably be “in the quadrillions of paper dollars” (and we’ll NEED the word in regular conversation by high status people talking about the well being of the country)...
...and yet (presumably?) the debt-to-gdp ratio will never go above maybe 300% (not even in a crisis?) because such real world crises or financial gyrations will either lead to massive defaults, or renominalization (maybe go back to metal for a few decades?), or else the government will go bankrupt and not exist to carry those debts, or something “real” will happen.
Fundamentally, the ratio of debt-to-gdp is “real” in a way that the “monetary unit we use to talk about our inflationary script” is not. There are many possible futures where all countries on Earth slowly eventually end up talking about “pentillions of money units” without ever collapsing, whereas debt ratios are quite real and firm and eventually cause the pain that they imply will arrive...
One can see in teh graph below how these numbers mostly “clustering together because annual-interest-rates and debt-to-gdp-ratios are directly and meaningfully comparable and constrained by the realities of sane financial reasoning” much more clearly when you show debt ratios, over time, internationally...
...you can see in that data that Japan, Greece, and Israel are in precarious places, just with your eyeballs in that graph with nicely real units.
Then the US, the UK, Portugal, Spain, France, Canada, and Belgium are also out into the danger zone with debt well above 100% of GDP, where we better have non-trivial population growth and low government spending for a while, or else we could default in a decade or two.
A small part of me wonders if “the financial innumeracy of the median US and UK voter” are part of the explanation for why we are in the danger zone, and not seeming to react to it in any sort of sane way, as part of the zeitgeist of the English speaking world?
For both of our governments, they “went off the happy path” (above 100%) right around 2008-2011, due to the Great Recession. So it would presumably be some RECENT change that switched us from “financial prudence before” and then “financial imprudence afterwards”?
Maybe it is something boring and obvious like birthrates and energy production?
For reference, China isn’t on wikipedia’s graph (maybe because most of their numbers are make believe and its hard to figure out what’s going on there for real?) but it is plausible they’re “off the top of the chart” at this point. Maybe Xi and/or the CCP are innumerate too? Or have similar “birthrate and energy” problems? Harder to say for them, but the indications are that, whatever the cause, their long term accounting situation is even more dire.
Looping all the way back, was it before or after the Great Recession, in your memory, that British speakers de facto changed to using “billion” to talk about 10^9 instead of 10^12?))