What does one trillion dollars look like?

[jessriedel]

To me, it's much more constructive to visualize what a huge amount of money can buy, not the money itself. (One of the other commenters is right that it only makes sense to divide a trillion dollar debt over 300 million people. But I think numbers in the millions or even a billion should be visual because projects of this size are local, and so are not split over every American.)

$1 million is roughly how much a median-wage American ($40k/yr) can save by living modestly above subsistence levels ($18k/yr) over a 45 year career. I call it "a life's work".

Now, this isn't just a hobby or side project. Most people happily and rightfully include raising their children as their proudest life's accomplishment. It's "what can one do in a human lifetime after paying for room and board".

Anyways, this helps me think harder when our local government wants to spend $5 million on a project. Is it really worth 5 life's works? Maybe, maybe not.

[thrownaway2424]

What could you do with a trillion bucks? You could build 20000 miles of high-speed railways. You could purchase, outright, more than 90% of Canada.

I used to think about this a lot when the cost of Bush the Lesser's war was passing a trillion dollars. It eventually ended up costing almost 2 trillion.

[rm999]

It's really hard to imagine a trillion dollars, but it's also hard to imagine 7 billion people or 300 million Americans. Usually when we're talking about trillions of dollars we're talking about something at a national or international level, i.e. shared among a large group of people. Dollars per capita is often a better metric because it's normalized to something more tangible.

A trillion dollars is about 3200 dollars per American or 12000 dollars per American taxpayer. It's still a lot of money, but much easier to think about.

[rogerbinns]

> ... per American taxpayer

Isn't everyone a taxpayer? Or did you only mean "federal taxpayer"? Even then anyone who has a phone is paying federal taxes on the service. And people pay tax on consumption (sales and service taxes), city, county and state taxes, fuel, and the list goes on. I suspect that the vast majority pay taxes several times a month rather than the 1 in 4 you imply!

[curtis]

One problem with these kinds of visualizations is that they're often used to visualize things like the U.S. federal budget or, especially, the federal debt. The problem is that to tell those stories accurately, the visualization of trillions of dollars should be accompanied by a visualization of 300 million people.

[kens]

I find it extremely helpful to convert any big US-wide number a per-capita value, which you can easily estimate in your head by multiplying by 3 and dividing by a billion. As a random example, the US spends $55 billion on pets annually, which is just an arbitrary number to me. But convert this to about $165 per capita and now it's much easier to see if this number is reasonable, compare it to other expenditures, etc.

(And then there's the satirical visualization from Saturday Night Live: How big is a $16 trillion dollar debt? Imagine each of these dollar bills represents one trillion dollars. It would take a stack of 16 of them to equal $16 trillion dollars.)

[CarlosT]

Exactly. Since 50% of high growth companies are funded with less than $50,000, $1 trillion would fund the start of 20M young high growth companies. Fairly certain at least one of those, 20M, would have solved the financial crisis.

In other related news, as of a couple of years ago, my town has a beautiful new landscaped highway median, welcoming you as you enter the city.

Source: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201209/inc-staff/survey-of-inc-5...

[startupfounder]

$6.6 billion in cash was "lost"[0] and then found[1] in Iraq which I can now visualize as 66 pallets of cold hard cash. How do you lose that?

[0]http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/06/13/exp.tsr... [1]http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2011/10/26/once-thought-lost-a...

[Edit] There is $1.18 Trillion in circulation in the USA, about as much as in the last image: http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm

[protomyth]

I know a railroad "lost" a car full of soybeans. It was pre-9/11 and when they finally figured out where they put it(1), the cargo wasn't "fresh".

1) to be fair, the RR company didn't find the car, a worker from the company that was shipping the soybeans spotted it on his way to work and called them.

[alan_cx]

Iraq is well known for its huge Sufis....

[neilxdsouza]

Here is my visualization of the 16 Trillion Dollars bailout given by the Federal Reserve to the Banks that cannot fail:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/have-you-heard-a...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/traceygreenstein/2011/09/20/the-...

US Population : About 314 million Bailout : USD 16 Trillion = 16000 billion = 16,000,000 million Hence loading factor per person: 16,000,000 / 314 = about 50000 dollars. I.e. The Federal Reserve Loaded every US citizen with an additional burden of USD 50,000

[dredmorbius]

As with others: values make most sense not in the abstract (how big is a stack of $1 trillion in $100 bills), but in context.

How does a budget item compare with other items on the budget? How does it compare with GDP or population? How does the cost of a school compare with a hospital?

Here's the US federal budget depicted graphically: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/2012...

The xkcd "money" graphic is a classic of the genre, representing values from a cup of coffee ($2) to the all human economic productivity ($2,397 trillion).

http://xkcd.com/980/huge

[hkmurakami]

Or it could look like one platinum coin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion_Dollar_Coin

[BasilAwad]

Visualization Summary: Scrooge McDuck use to dive into about 1/4 of a trillion dollars.

[fpp]

The "mother" of the dollar bill stack visualizations was done by "crunchweb" in 2003/2006 to visualize the cost of the Iraq war (then 316 Billion - now > 1 Trillion)

http://87billion.com/

Another good one - visualizing the cost of the 2008 financial crisis (581 Trillion)

http://duvet-dayz.com/archives/2008/03/27/632/

[archangel_one]

Worth noting: that figure of $581tn is the total worldwide exposure in derivatives, not the actual amount lost. They give the much more reasonable figure of $1.1tn earlier, and suggest that's unlikely to be accurate, but then go on to visualise the higher amount as though that's what the crisis cost with no real evidence at all.

Given the nature of derivatives, it might well not be possible to lose that much ever, even if the zombiepocalypse happens.

[vbs_redlof]

Another "mother" http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/derivatives/bank_ex...

[paprika]

Very trivial (or maybe not?) to illustrate that kind of money next to one single human being. Interesting though.

Something similar - Greek's debt illustrated on trucks of cash: http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...

[vlasev]

I find that this is not a good way to visualize what a trillion dollars looks like. Check out these infographics - they are a lot better.

http://demonocracy.info/

[tzury]

Just to make it clear once forever, that in Hollywood movies, when they say "You have 3 hours too arrange $100MM in cash" etc. there is no way this money will feet into a suitcase.

[wereHamster]

A bitcoin private key fits nicely onto a single page of paper. Print it, hand it over to the bad guys, done.

[michaelkscott]

I wonder what it would look like if the stack was filled with one dollar bills rather than 100s. I'm sure the visualization would be quite mind boggling.

[alan_cx]

This is why some one wins a lottery and the wants to see the hard cash, its always in small bills. Showing them in large bills is a massive disappointment.

[thelegit]

bet it'd be 100x as big...

hah sorry had to.. but seriously would be crazy!

[intopieces]

The writing on this page is insufferable. A more effective presentation of this information would have been a simple graphic.

[maaku]

"A billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon we're talking about real money." (-my first civil servant boss)

[jacques_chester]

Originally attributed Senator Dirksen, though he later claimed it was a misquote by a journalist.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Everett_Dirksen

[alpb]

I remember this page from 2005 or so. Good to see again indeed.

[samholmes]

I guess I could live on that amount. :\

[sddhrthrt]

Now, that's the SketchUp, isn't it? ;)

[bestest]

Why is _this_ one the front page?

[xkcdfanboy]

Because a majority of asshat startup fanatics are also money fanatics. Let's face it, most of the reason people want to do startups, it because they have dreams of grandeur.

And I agree, it is extremely embarrassing that this money article would be vote up by HN users.

[berkay]

Wonder how much it weighs?