Politicians and journalists are tossing vast numbers around like confetti at the minute. In a way, this helps us all deal with the uncertainties of the pandemic, as the numbers become increasingly unreal, part of the generalised surreality of the whole situation. If the numbers are too big to comprehend, they start to seem too big to worry about.
At some stage, though, we are going to have to deal with these numbers for real. This is what a couple of them mean in concrete terms.
There are 60 seconds in a minute, 3,600 in an hour, 86,400 in a day, 31.5 million seconds in a year.
A billion seconds take 31.7 years to pass. An average lifespan of 80 years would comprise 2.5 billion seconds.
In the month of April the UK public sector needed £63.5 billion to top up existing government income. (Note 1) If we look at that number and use time to get a sense of scale, 63.5 billion seconds is 2,012 years. Going back 2,012 years, that takes us to 8 AD. Going past the Plague and the Black Death and Chaucer, pausing at the Battle of Hastings to note we’ve only done one half of the journey, going back through the Dark Ages, as the Roman empire approaches its peak, to the time when Ovid was alive, and Britain was still Albion, laying a pound on the ground every second.
Put your finger on your pulse. Tick tick it goes, solidly, at one beat every second. There were 259,000 seconds in April. The UK government needed to borrow or print more than £24,000 every single second. Imagine that, with every heartbeat, 24,000 pound notes fluttering down from the sky.
To take a global view, in an April 2020 article by Gita Gopinath, the Chief Economist of the IMF, the cumulative loss of global output due to the pandemic is estimated at US$ 9 trillion, assuming that “the pandemic fades in the second half of 2020 and that policy actions taken around the world are effective in preventing widespread bankruptcies, extended job losses and system-wide financial strains”. (Note 2 )
It’s 239,000 miles from the earth to the moon. That’s 15 billion inches. 9 trillion is 600 times that. 600 trips to the moon, tearing up a dollar bill every inch of the way to reflect the loss to the global economy.
As a US senator almost certainly didn’t say: “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” (Note 3)
Sources:
1: Office for National Statistics UK public sector finances April 2020
3: Widely but probably wrongly attributed to US Senator Everett Dirkson