Confusion over a Billion

[Mr Q]

   Wow, am I old   When I was in school (1950s), most kids had a problem with understanding (visualizing) a thousand. Me, I had problems with a million, which was mostly used in countries' populations and rarely with financial topics. But today? My old mind is reeling trying to contemplate a billion, never mind a trillion or quadrillion (?) My billions of neurons in my brain are aching just thinking about it

[HumptyMoo]

It's all the fault of the rich as usual, they saw that with inflation millionaires would become 2 a penny and "thousand millionaire's" just didn't have the ring to it....so they went ahead and told every one of their "yes men" board room disciples that in fact 1000 million was a billion and that they should refer to them as billionaires...hence the reason it was adopted into the mainstream.

100% truth, it has to be, bloke down the pub told me.

[Bukko]

I remember hearing, some years ago, when the news was full of woe around the amount of debt the UK was in.

"Someone" phoned the Treasury to ask if the Billions being thrown around was the American sort, or the old British sort.

"Not sure" came the reply, "let me find out". When the answer came back the American sort, the someone said.. "well, that's not nearly as bad then".

You had to laugh.

I grew up with a Billion being a million million; working for an American company, now view Billions as Thousand Millions or 10⁹.

Good thread !!

Gordon.

[Scott]

In 1966 (I think) the Australian government was concerned that we were falling behind in the millionaire stakes so over night they fixed it. Went from £'s to $'s and doubled our millionares. I'm told next week we're adopting the Zimbabwean Dollar.....Would I lie?

[Ags]

Visualize a billion? I think of a meter cube. Each side is 1000mm, so it contains one billion 1mm cubes.

[HumptyMoo]

^^For me that's actually quite a neat way to get perspective...thanks Ags.

[Qualia]

The Long Scale

a ten has 1 zero: 10 (10 x 1)

a hundred has 2 zeros: 100 (10 x 10)
a thousand has 3 zeros: 1,000 (100 x 100)
a million has 6 zeros: 1,000,000 (1,000 x 1,000)
a billion has 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000 (1 million x 1 million)
a trillion has 18 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

However, you can use a different kind of logic and end up with something like this:

The Short Scale

a ten has 1 zero: 10 (10 x 1)

a hundred has 2 zeros: 100 (10 x 10)
a thousand has 3 zeros: 1,000 (100 x 100)
a million has 6 zeros: 1,000,000 (1,000 x 1,000)
a billion has 9 zeros: 1,000,000,000 (1 million x 1,000)
a trillion has 12 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000

I think the long scale was devised in Europe (probably in France) some 600 years ago. With a lot of toing and froing the situation can be summed up like this:

Long Scale

European countries; all Spanish-speaking countries except Puerto Rico, and some previous African colonies.

Short Scale

Russia and many previous colonies of the European empires have kept the short scale system, most notably, Brazil, USA, Australia, north and west Africa and the Middle East. 

I personally use the long scale for no better reason than it intuitively makes more sense to me; puts things into a more graspable perspective, so to say. Give or take a few years, I can picture the arrival of the Big Bang better with a figure like 14,000 million, than I can with some preposterous number like 14 billion