Difference Between One Million and One Billion
Intellectually, we all know that a billion is much more than a million. You know, 1000 times more. We know that Jeff Bezos is much richer than, for example, Beyoncé, and that Bill Gates’ wealth puts the Kardashians to shame.
But did you know that 1 billion is actually more than 1 million? Probably no. This is because people find it difficult to imagine the difference in degrees between two numbers. As Gizmodo reports :
Living and developing in the so-called natural state, our Paleolithic ancestors did not need (that is, did not experience environmental pressure) to develop such an ability. At that time, and before the advent of the formal number system, primitive people really needed to get a general idea of small numbers, such as the number of people in a clan or the number of animals that can occupy a certain territory.
This is good news for people like Bezos and Gates, because chances are, if you knew how much money they actually have (well, how high their net worth actually is), you probably wouldn’t be too happy. To better understand this, we will compare Bey and Bezos. The pop star’s fortune was $ 355 million, according to Forbes’ 2018 List of Richest Self-Made Women . This is an almost inconceivably large number. Yet Bezos’s fortune of $ 164 billion according to Forbes ‘2018 list of 400 richest Americans easily surpasses it (Bezos’ net worth fluctuates daily). In fact, it would take over 462 Beyoncés to get Beyoncé’s net worth. Bey didn’t even make the 400 list.
How about 1 trillion? We’ll have to save this for another video.