What's a Billion Dollar
As you might notice, I last wrote here in 2006 but I just saw this on the web courtesy a tweet by @picturecool and I just had to lift my pen... er, my fingers again. The figure intends to put some major world dollar figures - debts, budgets, expenses, estimates, charities, etc. - in some perspective, and you do get an amazing feel of where all the money in the world is going, or should be going, or of how much somebody said something will cost vs. what they really cost!
For example, if you look at that big purple rectangle on the top right side, that, my friend, is how much, it is estimated, that the Iraq war will cost - 3,000 billions of dollars! Notice that it is just an estimate, at the end may go up or come down. This rectangle is the largest block in the figure, except for the worst case financial losses for the US government (again an estimate) in the current global financial crisis. Bigger even than the actual losses of $2,800B in the crisis to date (August of 2009). Now, if you scoot down to the left of that big purple rectangle and squint, you will see a "small" faded out purple rectangle, representing a measly 60 billion dollars. That was what the advocates for the war said in 2003 it would cost the American tax payers. Now, I am a project Manager and I know that sometime it costs more to do something than was initially estimated, but this... this ballooning of 50 times the of the original estimate - something just smells fishy to me.
Ok, let's take a look at something else. If the American charity givers wanted ($300B), they could wipe out the entire debt of the countries in the African continent to Western nations ($200B), feed every child in the world for one whole year ($54B) and still have a lot of spare change left over in the coffers to save the Amazon forest ($21B). Compare the defense budget of the various nations ($511B) to the cost of sending a manned mission to Mars ($230B). Compare how much it would cost the world to move to solar and other renewable energy sources ($515B) to how much OPEC earns from oil exports ($520B) each year. It is fascinating to see how much lasting good can be done if people can somehow become less parochial! It is depressing to see how far we are from attaining it.
