It is All Relative

When it comes to comparing sums of money from different eras, it is all relative. In order to provide some perspective, a writer will often tell you what an amount is yesterday's dollars is worth in today's dollars.

A billion is yesterday's million. Mergers are multi-billion dollar affairs. Wealth is measured in billions. Mere millionaires need not apply.

Millions, and now billions, are amounts so large to most of us that they they abstract. They are so beyond anything we deal with in out lives on a daily basis that they are just words following dollar signs and numbers.

Those of a decidedly certain age will remember the U.S. Senator from Illinois, the velvet-voiced Everett Dirksen, who in the 60s once commented on how ubiquitous the quoted amounts of a million dollars had become. "A million here and a million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money." It really can add up.

There are several benchmarks of money that I hold onto. Two of them that don't involve real estate are what the New York Met Lenny Dykstra was making in his rookie year—the minimum of $100,000. Lenny of course eventually made more, then went on to be convicted of financial fraud and spent several innings (measured in months) in Federal prison.

The other one is also a baseball benchmark. I can still distinctly remember where I was sitting in P.S. 22 (I can't remember the grade I was in) when I considered what to me was the then staggering sum that each player on the New York Yankees was awarded for winning the just completed World Series. The share was $11,000 I believe. I couldn't help thinking that the amount was more than the cap stated on the F.D.I.C. insurance signs I would see in the bank I went to with my mother. I think the Dodger players as the losers were awarded $8,000, a sum anyone I knew would have been happy to have.

Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity was never about money, but there surely is a relativity to money.

Consider the opening paragraph of the New York Times reporter Sarah Lyall's piece on Margrethe Vestager, Europe's antitrust enforcer, when she tells us that Ms. Vestager is pursuing an examination of a proposed merger between Apply and Shazam, a music-identification app.. The deal is considered puny compared to other deals Ms. Vestager has taken an interest in.  Its value is not stated directly, but is described as being far less than $1 billion, a statement meant to convey how insignificant in money it is compared to other deals.

I have to say, I do know what it's like to be valued at less than $1 billion.

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