The Orders of Magnitude that Matter in the Time of COVID-19
Look at some orders of magnitude before you get angry at celebrities flaunting their lavish homes?
By Isaiah W. Ogren
When you really know something, you know it in your body. The biomechanics of an NBA jump shot, the schnoz of a master whiskey blender, the way an expert effortlessly weaves description, analogy, and metaphor together to explain a difficult, abstract concept—all of these are embodied knowledge. By contrast, there are certain ideas that the human brain can only process as abstract, that they cannot embody. Take the number two trillion (2*10^9 for my STEM friends). Sure, you’ve heard of that number, particularly if you followed the COVID-19 relief bill negotiations. You know how to add or subtract, multiply or divide two trillion, and otherwise mathematically manipulate that mass of zeros. But you can't imagine two trillion distinct things. You can't hold two trillion individual one dollar bills in your head at the same time. None of us can. Trained physicists top out at holding one million things in their head. Most people can barely imagine one thousand things. For the purposes of intuitive understanding, there is no difference in our brain’s level of understanding of two billion, two trillion, or two quadrillion.
Why does this matter? And what does it have to do with celebrities?
Throughout the COVID-19 crisis, we have seen the discourse around celebrities take a sharp turn from the typical hagiography. Hard questions are being asked, like whether it is fair that every member of the Utah Jazz was able to get COVID-19 tests, or why anyone would think it is a good idea to get a bunch of non-singers together to butcher John Lennon. Certainly, this virus is neither the “great equalizer” that some predicted, nor are celebrities in quarantine “just like us” because they can no longer go where they please, when they please.
Nevertheless, the discourse confuses celebrities, titans of industry, and the government in terms of scale and assignment of criticism. Take Gal Gadot, of aforementioned John Lennon butchery. She has a net worth of approximately $10 million to $20 million. Compare that to the fortune of Jeff Bezos, worth over $100 billion at last counting as of April 2020. The difference between them is the same order of magnitude (1:10,000) as the difference between a reasonably thrifty Carlson school graduate and Gal Gadot. The difference is that our brains can process the difference between us and celebrities intuitively in a way that they cannot intuitively process the difference between Gal Gadot and Jeff Bezos—try as we might. We effortlessly know that we are not Gal Gadot. We have to work to know that Gal Gadot is not Jeff Bezos.
This matters even more when we consider how much money the federal government should be spending, how we allocate our attention in the moment, and eventually, responsibility for situations that the world finds itself in. Looking at plans to bring the virus to heel and keep the economy going, one finds that we need to spend at least 10 trillion over the course of the crisis. The difference between that figure and one Jeff Bezos is 1 to 100, not as big as between Carlson Bro™ and Ms. Gadot, or Ms. Gadot and Bezos, but is still two orders of magnitude.
What is the purpose of this mathematical parable? The purpose is to show first that the actions of government matter exponentially more than multi-billionaires who in turn matter exponentially more than the actions of celebrities who can't sing. Secondly, we need to work to allocate our attention responsibly. And I do mean work. Conventional and social media have conditioned us all to be disproportionately interested in the subset of people that are just wealthy enough to raise our ire in a crisis, but not nearly influential enough to do much of anything about it. If you think about it, this is a fabulous arrangement for most billionaires and politicians, the majority of whom escape any meaningful public pressure or scrutiny.
It is fine to critique the wealthy for donating tiny amounts of their immense wealth to fighting the coronavirus and expecting a ticker tape parade. We must tax the wealthy more and demand measures that reduce wealth inequality. But in an era where all of our bandwidth is stretched past all reasonable limits, and righteous anger is at a premium, next time you are frustrated with a celebrity complaining about how hard their new life is, instead of retweeting a pithy critique, try calling Congress instead. They can be reached at (202) 224-3121.