One, Two, American Dream

Tom Van Dyke’s recent post on how we’re not so good at math when it matters reminded me that we’re not so good at math when it matters. When linguists first began investigating tribal humans, it was discovered that many of them counted “one”, “two”, “many”. The explanation was that only with the increasingly-complex demands of agricultural and monetary civilization did sophisticated number systems develop.

Yet, such counting methods are still relatively new, and human physiology has yet to adjust. Indeed, modern people still think of numbers in terms of basic units: when we visualize three of something, we think of one group of one and one group of two. Four is two groups of two. Five is two groups of two and one group of one, etc. For complex systems like money, where order-of-magnitude is the relevant property, we must have real anchors to which we can assign relative numerical value, or else we have no conceptual basis.

For example, one dollar is roughly the amount of money that buys me one pack of M&Ms. Ten dollars buys me a used Bloodsport DVD. 300 dollars buys me a PlayStation 3 or pays for one-week’s rent in a studio apartment. 15,000 dollars buys me a five-year-old car in decent condition. A 100,000-dollar loan puts me through business school. If I’m very lucky, very well-educated, and work very hard, in ten years, 200,000 dollars could be my annual salary. If I make the right choices, use my money effectively, and save or invest wisely, I might even be able to buy my one-million-dollar dream house in twenty-five years.

This one-million-dollar dream house is the absolute conceptual limit for 99% of Americans. Quantities above this limit are simply and crudely assigned the value of “many”.

So it’s no surprise that people all over the country are getting equally up-in-arms about stimulus scandals, banker bonuses, con-men, costs of wars, healthcare spending, and the Waltons’s wealth. Nevertheless, to put it all in rigorous, mathematical perspective, here is a list of “many”s expressed in units of American Dreams:

 

Less than a dream house:

0 American Dreams – total 2010 revenues of the U.S. hemp industry

0.15 – the cost to the RNC of wardrobes for the Palin Family during the 2008 Presidential campaign

0.17 – a Senator’s salary

0.23 – amount donated to the McCain campaign by Goldman Sachs

0.98 – amount donated to the Obama campaign by Goldman Sachs

 

Posh neighborhoods:

13 American Dreams – Lloyd Blankfein’s 2010 salary

50 – Rush Limbaugh’s 2011 salary

54 – Lloyd Blankfein’s 2007 salary

388 – total amount spent by the Obama campaign on the Presidential election of 2008

398 – estimated cost of the proposed “Bridge to Nowhere” (which was never actually built)

 

La-di-da gated communities:

2,782 American Dreams – worldwide box-office revenues for Avatar

3,000 – amount alotted by Congress for the Cash for Clunkers program

6,000 – annual budget of the National Cancer Institute

8,100 – 2011 budget of the Transportation Security Administration

8,639 – the 2007 GDP of Cambodia

8,960 – total amount spent on specialty coffee in the U.S. in 2003

 

Exclusive suburbs:

10,000 American Dreams – the amount of federal stimulus money received by Goldman Sachs

18,700 – NASA’s entire 2010 budget

35,000 – estimated cost of universal preschool for three and four-year-olds

46,000 – amount spent on diets and self-help books in 2004 by Americans

50,000 – the amount of federal stimulus money estimated to have fallen into the hands of con men

50,000 – the cost of the Iraq War as estimated by the Pentagon in 2003

65,000 – losses to investors of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC

76,800 – estimated economic gain of drug legalization

93,000 – net worth of the Walton Family as of September 2011

94,000 – estimated cost to “enforce U.S. immigration law” – i.e. deport all the illegals (see estimated cost of the Iraq War above and adjust real number accordingly.)

 

Elite metropolitan areas:

115,300 American Dreams – total cost of the Marshall Plan adjusted for inflation

217,000 – total cost of the Louisiana Purchase adjusted for inflation

262,300 – the 2007 GDP of Argentina

460,000 – present market value of the Exxon Mobil Corporation

500,000 – total cost of the New Deal adjusted for inflation

 

Global megacities:

1,000,000+ American Dreams – total cost to date of the “War on Drugs”

1,600,000 – 2010 GDP of Canada

2,500,000+ – 2009 healthcare spending in the United States

3,600,000 – total cost of WWII adjusted for inflation

3,200,000 – 4,000,000  – estimated cost of all post-9/11 U.S. wars as of June 2011

 

I’ve provided the data. I’ll leave the inference to you.