Billions and billions...

We used to imitate Carl Sagan using that term to describe the seemingly infinite stars in the universe. Back then it seemed like the ultimate huge number and, like "millions and millions" came to express an unimaginably large amount, without anyone really understanding what that amount really was.

These days the world has changed. We now talk in terms of unimaginably large numbers to define real amounts that we still have trouble understanding. As of today, Feb. 16, 2009, the world population is estimated to be 6,706,993,152. That is: 6 billion, 706 million, 993 thousand, 152. Wow. The United States alone has 305,830,170 (305 million) people.

With all this economic bailout, recovery, and stimulus talk throwing around gargantuan sums like $787,000,000,000 (787 billion), folks are often lost trying to decipher exactly how much this is. This leads to comments you see proposing that if they just gave the money to the citizens we would all be millionaires. Not so. These enormous sums are not so enormous as that. Distributed to every person in America using the population figure above, that would only be $2573.32 each. Not so much after all.

Part of the confusion arises from there being two scales for determining ridiculously large numbers. To paraphrase the Wikipedia page on this: The long and short scales are two different numerical systems used throughout the world:
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Short scale refers to a system of numeric names in which every new term greater than million is 1,000 times the previous term: "billion" means "a thousand millions", "trillion" means "a thousand billions", and so on.

Long scale refers to a system of numeric names in which every new term greater than million is 1,000,000 times the previous term: "billion" (from bi and million) means "a million to the power of two" or "a million millions", "trillion" (from tri and million) means "a million to the power of three" or "a million billions", and so on.
The difference between the two scales grows as numbers get larger. Million is the same in both scales, but the long-scale billion is a thousand times larger than the short-scale billion, the long-scale trillion is a million times larger than the short-scale trillion, and so on.

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the United Kingdom uniformly used the long scale, while the United States of America used the short scale, so that usage of the two systems was often referred to as "British" and "American" respectively. In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that both countries now exclusively apply the short scale interpretation in mass media and official usage.
So, one billion = 1,000,000,000, and 1 Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000.
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Fortunately, unless we are astronomers, other scientists, or government economists, most of us do not have to wrap our mind around numbers like this every day. But it is important we do have some sense of the scale they convey when following and voting on projects that effect us all.

The White House team promises to have a website where we can follow the expenditures of all this money. I plan to keep an eye on it. While I have faith in the intent and intelligence of President Obama's administration, I sometimes feel that a large sum of money given to the legislative branch is like a Pinata with kindergartners. They tend to get a little crazy with it.

UPDATE: 2/18/2009 here is the page on the White House site with the State by State information on the Recovery & Reinvestment Act

UPDATE #2 - Here it is, the official site: www.recovery.gov. If nothing else, this administration is keeping it's vow of transparency in Government. I'm impressed.