I heard an advice (sounds reasonable, but I didn’t try it) that if you want to educate people about national economy without them getting confused by the “-illions”, you should pick one unit, for example “millions of dollars”, and always express costs using this unit. Importantly, do not call it “millions of dollars” but “megadollars”, to make it one word, and thus prevent people from converting it back mentally.
For example, instead of “$1,000” always say “0.001 M$”; instead of “$1,000,000,000” always say “1000 M$”. The idea is that after using this style consistently, people will remember the difference between prices expressed in “fractions of megadollars” and prices expressed in “thousands of megadollars” (where they would otherwise confuse e.g. millions with billions), because they always heard it that way.
It would work best if this style was adopted by schools and journalists consistently. (Yeah, one can dream.)
I heard an advice (sounds reasonable, but I didn’t try it) that if you want to educate people about national economy without them getting confused by the “-illions”, you should pick one unit, for example “millions of dollars”, and always express costs using this unit. Importantly, do not call it “millions of dollars” but “megadollars”, to make it one word, and thus prevent people from converting it back mentally.
For example, instead of “$1,000” always say “0.001 M$”; instead of “$1,000,000,000” always say “1000 M$”. The idea is that after using this style consistently, people will remember the difference between prices expressed in “fractions of megadollars” and prices expressed in “thousands of megadollars” (where they would otherwise confuse e.g. millions with billions), because they always heard it that way.
It would work best if this style was adopted by schools and journalists consistently. (Yeah, one can dream.)