"The Money Becomes Purely Symbolic"

Michael Lewis:

To the political process all big numbers look alike; above a certain number the money becomes purely symbolic. The general public has no ability to feel the relative weight of 173 billion and 165 million. You can generate as much political action and public anger over millions as you can over billions. Maybe more: the larger the number the more abstract it becomes and, therefore, the easier to ignore. (The trillions we owe foreigners, for example.)

The ability of the human mind to grasp large numbers is an interesting subject. In When Money Dies (pdf here) Fergusson mentions "the delirium of milliards," a reference to the limits of numeric cognition:

“The delirium of milliards [i.e., billions]” was a phrase of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau’s coining. “The majority of statesmen and financiers think in terms of paper,” he wrote. “They sit in their offices and look at papers .. and on those papers are written figures which again represent papers. A milliard comes easily and trippingly to the tongue, but no one can imagine a milliard. Does a wood contain a milliard leaves? Are there milliard blades of grass in a meadow?”

Part of the reason 1923 was a seminal year in Germany was because it ruptured the natural boundary between the tangible and the abstract. "Millions" and "billions" became part of everyday life, the numbers indistinguishable from each other and essentially meaningless beyond how many eggs a new, larger number would buy each day. Recall Thomas Mann:

The market woman who demanded in a dry tone "one hundred billion" mark for a single egg had lost during inflation her ability to be amazed at anything. Since that time nothing was so mad or so atrocious that it could have caused any awe in people anymore.

Canetti took this a step further. He argued that the "delirium" infected psychology on both a national and individual level, and suggested that it paved the way for mass atrocities by making large numbers -- removed from their underlying reality and therefore their consequences -- routine in the bureaucracy. The broader effect was a sort of culturalization of fiscal values. It's an interesting theory. Hitler's speeches and Nazi literature in general -- starting with "a thousand years" -- were peppered with the language of large numbers. Germans found it mesmerizing and, propitiously for the Nazis, abstract.

It took years for the psychological damage of 1923 to become obvious. As millions and billions and trillions get batted around casually in the context of a similar national trauma, we'll see what else becomes "purely symbolic" and "easy to ignore" down the road.