Suggestions on presenting large numbers with visual aids

Imagine you had to give a presentation on the current economic crisis. We read, for instance, that the Federal Reserve will purchase securities up to $1.25 trillion this year. How would you convey the scale of this to an audience?

One option might be to say that the if these were $100 bills a stack of a trillion would reach 64,834 miles – a quarter-way to the moon. The problem you face as a speaker is that very few audience members have a clear concept of how far 64,000 miles really is; fewer still have been to the moon. But people are fond of these analogies:

One trillion seconds would take you back 31,709 years to the time of the hunter-gatherers. If you lined up the 1.5tn (British) pound coins that were reported to have been wiped off the global markets on one single black Friday, they would get you from here to Mars.

These words impress, but they only replace one abstraction with another.

Better is a picture (worth 1,000 words – which is the approximate length of this blog posting…).

This is one time when a speaker would benefit from a PowerPoint slide.

Pictures illustrating the enormity and scale are much more effective than words.

Here’s a powerful set of illustrations from OneNote which brought home for me what a trillion dollars really looks like – especially in relation to a $10,000 wad of cash, which is something most audience members can grasp:

A packet of one hundred $100 bills is less than 1/2″ thick and contains $10,000. It fits in your pocket easily:

Wad of $10,000

Believe it or not, this next little pile is $1 million dollars (100 packets of $10,000). You could stuff that into a grocery bag and walk around with it:

Pile of a Million Dollars