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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • That’s my point. We (those of us that aren’t at least millionaires) don’t really differentiate in society between someone that has a million dollars and someone that has 10 million dollars; they’re both stuck in the “millionaires” tier.

    So say you are making $50,000 a year, well it’s easy to see how you or someone like you could (theoretically) get to $100,000; that’s just the next tier up. And then it’s easy to imagine someone going from $100,000 to a million because that’s the next tier up again. But once you get there, people don’t tend to think of ten million as a tier and usually not a hundred million either. The next tier in our zeitgeist after million is billion.

    So people tend to think of billion being kind of the same as going from $100,000 to $1,000,000. Hence the common disconnect about just how much more money a billionaire has than the common man.


  • hogunner@lemmy.worldtoWork Reform@lemmy.worldOne Mississippi
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    1 year ago

    I have a theory about this: We group money in magnitudes of tens up to a million but then jump up from 10x to 1,000x:

    1

    10

    100

    1,000

    10,000

    100,000

    1,000,000

    1,000,000,000

    That’s a huge increase but our minds like patterns so we instinctively feel that a billion must be about 10x a million and not the 1,000x it really is, thus leading to huge inaccuracies.