Ten to the Ninth Power

There used to be a saying that an English major was a pre-med student who couldn’t pass calculus. Maybe so. Math, after all, can be annoyingly abstract for students of humane letters. But consider this. A billion is a thousand million. So for a single appropriation of 1 billion dollars we could hire a thousand decently qualified doctors at a million a year to research treatment for cancer. They could wipe out their student loan debt in a single year and maybe, just maybe, extend some lives in the bargain. Ten billion would hire an army of ten thousand. Wouldn’t this be a better expenditure of public money than another year in Iraq or another year in Afghanistan, another bank bailout or another dozen prisons? Uh oh. It’s those pesky humanities again.