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them. I was just reading in another catalog about a fancy kitchen accessory from Italy called a Porto
Rotolo di
Carta, which boasts "a spring tension arm," "stainless steel guide," "crafted brass fmial," and
"rubber gasket for exceptional stability"-all for just $49.95-when I realized that it was, in fact, a
paper towel holder.
Obviously the catalog couldn't say, "No matter how you look at it, this is just a paper towel
dispenser and you would be a sap to buy it," so they must try to dazzle you with its exotic pedigree
and technical complexity.
In consequence, even the most mundane catalog items boast more design features than a 1954 Buick.
I have before me a glossy book from another company announcing with undisguised pride that its
flannel shirts feature, among much else, gauntlet buttons, extra-long sleeve plackets, two-ply 40S
yarn construction (" for a superior nap"), boxed back pleat, double stitching at stress points, handy
locker loop and non-fused collar, whatever all that may be. Even socks come with lengthy,
scientific-sounding descriptions extolling their seamless closures, one-to-one fiber loops, and
hand-linked yarns.
I confess I have sometimes been briefly tempted by these seductive blandishments to make a
purchase, but in the end I realize that given a choice between paying $37.50 for a shirt with a
superior nap and just having a nap, I will always go for the latter.
However, let me say right here that if anyone comes up with a Totally Nude Macarena
Socket-Wrench Home Work-out Video with handy locker loop in a choice of colors, I am ready to
place my order now.
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THE NUMBERS GAME
The U. S. Congress, which never ceases to be amazing, recently voted to give the Pentagon $11
billion more than it had asked for. Do you have any idea how much $11 billion is? Of course you
don't. Nobody does. It is not possible to conceive of a sum that large.
No matter where you turn with regard to America and its economy you are going to bump into figures
that are so large as to be beyond meaningful comprehension. Consider just a few figures culled at
random from this week's papers. California has an economy worth $850 billion. The annual gross
domestic product of the United States is $6.8 trillion. The federal budget is $1.6 trillion, the federal
deficit nearly $200 billion.
It's easy to lose sight of just how enormous these figures really are. America's cumulative debt at last
count, according to Time magazine, was "a hair" under $4.7 trillion. The actual figure was $4.692
trillion, so that statement is hard to argue with, yet it represents a difference of $8 billion-a pretty
large hair in anybody's book.
I worked long enough on the business desk of a national newspaper in England to know that even the
most experienced financial journalists often get confused when dealing with terms like billion and
trillion, and for two very good reasons. First, they have usually had quite a lot to drink at lunch, and,
second, such numbers really are confusing.
And that is the whole problem. Big numbers are simply beyond what we are capable of grasping. On
Sixth Avenue in New York there is an electronic billboard, erected and paid for by some anonymous
source, that
22 announces itself as "The National Debt Clock." When I was last there, it listed the national debt
at $4,533,603,804,000-that's $4.5 trillion-and the figure was growing by $10,000 every second, or
so fast that the last three digits on the electronic meter were a blur. But what does $4.5 trillion
actually mean?
Well, let's just try to grasp the concept of $1 trillion. Imagine that you were in a vault filled with
dollar bills and that you were told you could keep each one you initialed. Say, too, for the sake of
argument that you could initial one dollar bill per second and that you worked straight through
without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count a trillion dollars? Go on, humor
me and take a guess. Twelve weeks? Two years? Five?
If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12
days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to
accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days-something over three years-to reach $100 million. After
31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as
wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and
even then you would be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing
America's national debt).
That is what $1 trillion is.
What is interesting is that it is becoming increasingly evi dent that most of these inconceivably vast
sums that get bandied about by economists and policy makers are almost certainly miles out anyway.
Take gross domestic product, the bedrock of modern economic policy. GDP was a concept that was
originated in the 1930s by the economist Simon Kuznets. It is very good at measuring physical
things-tons of steel, board feet of lumber, potatoes, tires, and so on. That was all very well in a
traditional industrial economy. But now the greater part of output for nearly all developed nations is
in services and ideas-things like computer software, telecommunications, financial services-which
produce wealth but don't necessarily, or even generally, result in a product that you can load on a
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pallet and ship out to the marketplace.
Because such activities are so difficult to measure and quantify, no one really knows what they
amount to. Many economists now believe that America may have been underestimating its rate of
GDP growth by as much as two to three percentage points a year for several years. That may not
seem a great deal, but if it is correct then the American economy-which obviously is already
staggeringly enormous-may be one-third larger than anyone had thought. In other words, there may be
hundreds of billions of dollars floating around in the economy that no one suspected were there.
Incredible.
Here's another even more arresting thought. None of this really matters because GDP is in any case a
perfectly useless measurement. All that it is, literally, is a crude measure of national income-" the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]