measures and numbers

In a column titled, "How Policy Makers Use Number Analyses to Turn Our Heads," the Wall Street Journal's "numbers guy," Carl Bialik, writes here about using analogies to describe very large numbers -- a device that writers, speakers and communicators of all stripes should use with caution. Bialik collects some amusing and bizarre measures -- like the website that figured every American adult could buy two pairs of Manolo Blahnik pumps for the cost of the war in Iraq -- and analyses some popular number analogies, like this one:

For those looking to use policy figures to stun rather than edify, one popular device is to describe a stack of bills stretching into space. Ronald Reagan used that image -- a tower of $1,000 bills 67 miles high -- in 1981 to depict the national debt, which was headed toward $1 trillion. In a 1998 Brookings Institution report, Stephen Schwartz wrote that the total cost of nuclear weapons to that point equaled a stack of dollar bills stretching to the moon and nearly back.

But "people don't have much of a grasp of the distance from here to the moon," [Hopkins cognitive scientist ]Prof. McCloskey points out. He suggests making numbers small, such as figuring costs per person.

One person mentioned in the article brought actual stacks of bills to a news conference to aid the analogy. We say: If you have to work that hard, your audience still may not get it, so use the analogies sparingly. And check out Bialik's blog post on this column, which includes links to all sorts of sites that help us visualize numbers and dollars.