Money Talk

Big Money Grows —Our Languaging Should, Too

Let’s stop using dollars to measure people’s money

“Euro banknote with measure tape on white background” by wuestenigel is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A recent Forbes report illuminated yet more confirmation of the wealth gap. Not that there is a gap — that came about when the first person decided their seashell equated to wealth, committing their peers to instant poverty — but the acceleration of it. According to Forbes the number of billionaires went up ~30% this past year. Wow. And the rest of us thought 2020 was a tough year financially.

But we’re not here to rehash that. Let’s instead talk about how we talk about money. A billionaire is someone whose wealth is more than USD $1 billion. Celebrity businessmen Bezos and Musk are worth 100x even that. But can anyone understand what it means?

Being a medium of exchange, money’s very purpose is a means to offer a shared comparison. The shared concept of value hastens our transactions. Dollars and consensus.

Maybe now, as the height of today’s economic pyramids are based on a world nearing eight billion, we should update the tiny measuring stick of the US dollar, first employed when the world’s population was less than one.

Here’s the problem. We’ve exchanged paper ledgers for computers. Sufficient for particle physics, they will gladly store…