Comment

Only a billion
These days when discussing finance politicians invariably talk in billions of dollars, I.E. “the deficient is only four billion dollars” or “the project is only one and a half billion”. The problem being that without any idea of what an enormous number a billion is we tend to focus on the four or the one and a half and think ‘that’s not too bad’.
It’s not just New Zealand politicians who have cottoned on to this sleight of hand, it is practiced by politicians world wide. An English mathematician concerned at the way people were largely unaware of the huge amounts the political masters were talking about decided to do something about clarifying the situation.
To help visualise a billion he worked out the number in relation to time. Hence: A billion seconds ago it was 1959, or a billion minutes ago Jesus was alive. What about in hours? well a billion hours ago it was the stone age and a billion days ago nobody walked on two legs.
It also helps to see it as a figure: $1,000,000,000.
As you can see a billion is a staggering number. The mathematician then worked out how long it took his (English) government spent one billion pounds (aprox two billion $NZ) . The answer was 13 hours and 12 minutes.
By comparison our commendably cost conscious District Council’s all up spending will take the Council five years to having spent a billion of our dollars.
If my maths is up to scratch, using the 2011 appropriation vote and presuming that Treasury is sending the cheques out over eight hour days it currently takes the New Zealand government 24 hours and 39 minutes to spend each billion of our dollars. I’m happy to be corrected on this one – so come on you mathematicians out there!
However when it comes real big spenders there’s little doubt that the English Football Premier League clubs are in a category all of their own. Manchester City, for instance, spent near two billion dollars (in NZ terms) in the last season. Only a third of this was covered by income the rest coming from it’s Abu-Dhabi oil magnate Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. Just as well he has deep pockets.
Mike Beckett