The first Presidential debate is going to be focused on domestic matters, and while there will likely be digressions into social issues like abortion and school choice, I anticipate the bulk of the discussion will focus on the economy.
Debates over economic issues tend to wash over people for a couple of reasons. For starters, most people have never studied economics, so even if they have a good sense of their own personal (or even small business) finances, macro-economic issues relating to how employment statistics are calculated or how the economy of Greece can collapse are unfamiliar.
But another thing that most people find difficult when trying to perform critical thinking about numbers is the size of the numbers being discussed in any debate on national or international economic affairs.
Was it only a dozen years ago (when Bill Gates became a billionaire) that people were talking about the ungraspable number of one-billion now seeming tangible?
Before then, it felt like the highest order of magnitude we were likely to have to deal with in everyday life would involve mere millions. Several million people (maybe even tens of millions) lived in our state, and the states were part of a country with hundreds of millions of citizens. In fact, you didn’t hit the billion mark unless you were talking about the population of the entire planet.
And in our personal lives, if we worked hard (or were very lucky) we could become millionaires (with the term multi-millionaire reserved for the very successful few).
No longer. For today it’s not just the planet whose population is measured in the billions (closing in at 7 last count), but the “b-word” can be applied to a single country (China). And with many Americans living in homes that, if sold, would fetch something in the seven-figure range, suddenly Americans lucky enough to have bought a house in a fetching suburb early enough last century are (at least on paper) millionaires.
Which might explain why we only want to include those whose wealth is measured in the billions (or at least hundreds of millions) when we contemplate the Lifestyles of the (truly) Rich and Famous.
When this administration (and the last one) decided a government stimulus was necessary to jump start the economy, it was determined that only a stimulus of hundreds of billions (or a trillion) dollars would convince the public and markets that such a stimulus should be taken seriously. Which means we are now reaching a point when not only is a million not treated with respect, but even billions or tens of billions is considered chump change.
So how can we make sense of numbers too large for most of us to have practical experience with that are, nonetheless, considered too small when bandied about during a political debate?
Well some background knowledge is a good starting point, and while a course on macro-economics is well beyond the scope of the Critical Voter project, it might be valuable to consider this list of economic fallacies that should feel familiar to those who have been following our discussion of logic and argumentation.
As for those very large numbers, other than understanding that arithmetic is still relevant when dealing with huge values (a point made with particular rhetorical flourish by Bill Clinton at the Democratic Convention), it’s worth remembering that in some fields (notably science), billions and even trillions mean almost nothing (given that there are 6.023 x 1023 molecules in a liter of water).
When dealing with what large numbers of people might do (or how large numbers of dollars might be raised or spent), the fields of statistics and probability are where enlightening formulas dwell. And while statistics is also beyond what we’ll be covering during the podcast, a good primer on probability theory can be found at the excellent Khan Academy.
And when you’re ready to apply this to critical reasoning, Critical Thinker Academy has these video lessons you can turn to.
In the meantime, keep in mind that while a billion plus a billion is likely to be more or less than two billion in the real world (since both those billions are likely to just be estimates), they still represent a whole lot of money we will be talking about spending (or raising) in the coming years.
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