[math-fun] the volume of the debt, us and france, or the volume of a pile of euros or american quarter.
Hello, I was talking to a person the other day, I could clearly see that the person could not understand what enomous amount is represented by the debt of countries like US or France. So I made this exercise , let's say we pile up quarters of the total amount of the debt , what volume would it make. For the US : about 7 times the volume of 1 tower of the former WTC. For France : in euro, would represent approximately the volume of the 2 principal pyramids of Gizeh, Kheops and the other, not the 3rd one. For the calculation i simply used the volume taken by 1 coin , either euro : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_coins or american quarters : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarter_%28United_States_coin%29 as if they piled in a square grid, this is the best approximation of volume I could find because the volume of loose coins is hard to measure precisely. That problems is of course related to the packing of spheres, some people here are experts in this area, does someone has an idea what a pile of loose euros or american quarter will occupy ? My approximation is not very good but it gives an idea of the volume, also, for those remembered in the sept. 11 eleven, please tell me what would be a standard volume of reference, something that most people would recognize as a large volume, like the size in cubic meters of the queen mary II, but that one is not easily found. I took the egyptian pyramids because it has to do with french history and Napoleon and it is well known. The debt of usa as everybody knows now is 14300 billion dollars and the french debt is about 5000 billion dollars, I converted to euro for the computation and of course the volume of the 2 pyramids. found here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_pyramids I sent my computations to the french journal 'Le Monde' and had no reaction at all as well as the Canard Enchaîné. Well, I my opinion : we are doomed, we are toasted. Best regards. Simon Plouffe
Simon Plouffe:
I was talking to a person the other day, I could clearly see that the person could not understand what enomous amount is represented by the debt of countries like US or France.
A one-trillion-dollars in $100-bills page has been on the net for a couple of years. It doesn't use your reference coins but nevertheless serves your purpose. (Better perhaps because folk still think of $100 as a sizable amount while a quarter is, well, not so much.) http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/ The picture of 11 trillion dollars (the U.S. national debt two years) ago is here: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/pallet_x_10000_x_11.jpg
Hmmm.... A trillion dollars in pennies must weigh quite a lot. (2.5g * 10^12 = 2.5*10^9kg ~ 2.5*10^6 tons). (And, yes, even though the penny is now mostly zinc, its metal value is still worth more than a penny, thanks to the devaluation of the dollar!) If the latest earthquake in Japan can change the rotation of the Earth in a measurable way, has humankind managed to change the rotation of the Earth in a _measurable_ way due to the redistribution of mass -- e.g., reservoirs, earthmoving, deforestation, whatever ? In other words, has there been an "anthropogenic" change in the Earth's rotation? At 10:22 AM 7/16/2011, Hans Havermann wrote:
Simon Plouffe:
I was talking to a person the other day, I could clearly see that the person could not understand what enomous amount is represented by the debt of countries like US or France.
A one-trillion-dollars in $100-bills page has been on the net for a couple of years. It doesn't use your reference coins but nevertheless serves your purpose. (Better perhaps because folk still think of $100 as a sizable amount while a quarter is, well, not so much.)
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/
The picture of 11 trillion dollars (the U.S. national debt two years) ago is here:
"HB" == Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> writes:
HB> Hmmm.... A trillion dollars in pennies must weigh quite a lot. (2.5g HB> * 10^12 = 2.5*10^9kg ~ 2.5*10^6 tons). (And, yes, even though the HB> penny is now mostly zinc, its metal value is still worth more than a HB> penny, thanks to the devaluation of the dollar!) You lost the 100 c/$ in there, yes? :; units You have: 2.5 g * 1e12 * 100 You want: megatonne * 250 You have: 2.5 g * 1e14 You want: megaton * 275.57783 / 0.003628739 (first metric tonnes, then short tons). According to http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/zn/zn.asp 2.5 g of zinc is worth on the order of 0.584 US cents. -JimC -- James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
* One _cent_ coins apparently cost a lot to make: "The US Mint reported that in fiscal year 2010 the cost of producing and shipping one-cent coins was $0.0179, i.e. more than the face value of the coin." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_%28United_States_coin%29 * One _dollar_ coins apparently cost a least 30 cents each to make: "And even though the neglected mountain of money recently grew past the $1 billion mark, the U.S. Mint will keep making more and more of the coins under a congressional mandate. The pile of idle coins, which so far cost $300 million to manufacture, could double by the time the program ends in 2016, the Federal Reserve told Congress last year." "So, there are now about 1.2 billion dollar-coin "assets" chilling in Federal Reserve vaults, unloved and bearing no interest. By the time the presidential coin series finishes, and there are coins honoring all past presidents, there could be 2 billion." http://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137394348/-1-billion-that-nobody-wants Current U.S. dollar coin weighs 8.1g -- a lot less than 2.5*100=250g ~ .55 pounds in pennies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_coin_%28United_States%29 At 12:05 PM 7/16/2011, James Cloos wrote:
"HB" == Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> writes:
HB> Hmmm.... A trillion dollars in pennies must weigh quite a lot. (2.5g HB> * 10^12 = 2.5*10^9kg ~ 2.5*10^6 tons). (And, yes, even though the HB> penny is now mostly zinc, its metal value is still worth more than a HB> penny, thanks to the devaluation of the dollar!)
You lost the 100 c/$ in there, yes?
:; units
You have: 2.5 g * 1e12 * 100 You want: megatonne * 250
You have: 2.5 g * 1e14 You want: megaton * 275.57783 / 0.003628739
(first metric tonnes, then short tons).
According to http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/zn/zn.asp 2.5 g of zinc is worth on the order of 0.584 US cents.
-JimC -- James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
"HB" == Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> writes:
HB> * One _cent_ coins apparently cost a lot to make: "The US Mint HB> reported that in fiscal year 2010 the cost of producing and shipping HB> one-cent coins was $0.0179, i.e. more than the face value of the coin." I didn't mean to imply that the cost of the metal is the extent of the cost of minting a coin. I'm not at all surprised that all the rest of the costs dwarf that of the metal itself. The high-security shipping alone must be a big chunk of that 1.79¢. And even though there is only a very thin layer of copper around the zinc, at current spot prices the copper just might be even more pricy than the zinc. -JimC -- James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com> OpenPGP: 1024D/ED7DAEA6
Hello, I my own computations, I took the CIA world fact book and computed the ratio of the debt to most of the countries, in my opinion these countries are technically bankrupt, the worst being Luxembourg, they owe 4 million dollars per person. I took the first 197 countries were the data was available, the countries that are in a bankrupt situation are in order Country ratio of debt and revenue per person Luxembourg 50.94 Monaco 18.20 Ireland 13.27 Netherlands 5.65 United Kingdom 4.27 Switzerland 4.25 Belgium 3.53 Denmark 3.07 Austria 2.51 France 2.39 Liberia 2.32 Portugal 2.18 Hong Kong 2.17 Norway 2.05 Finland 2.04 Sweden 2.02 Germany 1.86 Spain 1.77 Greece 1.66 Italy 1.34 Cook Islands 1.31 Latvia 1.18 Australia 1.08 Slovenia 0.99 United States 1.02 Canada is at the 34'th rank with a ratio of 0.79 So since, the debt of Luxembourg represent 51 times the annual revenue of a person then I am afraid they are doomed. The total being something like 62000 billion dollars, the interest of this is about 3000 billions dollars per year (at 5%). The curve of US debt (as well as most of the others) is steadily increasing, if we extrapolate the curve for let's say 250 years : First scenario, the international banking system will collapse and 3 countries might get pass this point , China, India and Russia, mostly because the amount of money the owe is ridiculous. Simon Plouffe
Part of what killed the ancient Roman Empire was overspending & the resulting rampant inflation: Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988. [Do a Google search for some Tainter lectures.] "In Egypt, from which the best documentation has survived, a measure of wheat that in the first century A.D. sold for ***six*** drachmae, had increased to 200 drachmae in 276 A.D., 9000 in 314, 78,000 in 324, and to more than ***2,000,000*** drachmae in 334 A.D." p. 143. "By the latter part of the third century the ***currency was so worthless that the State resorted to forced labor and an economy in kind***. The earliest example of the former may be Aurelian's conscription of craft associations to build the walls around Rome. By the time of Diocletian the State was so unable to rely on money to meet its needs that it collected its taxes in the form of supplies directly usable by the military and other branches of government, or in bullion to avoid having to accept its own worthless coins." p. 139. "But much of the rebuilding (and the building of Constantinople) was done by stealing accumulated treasures from other places. Despite this, the building of Constantinople was a major drain, as was the support of its 80,000 citizens placed on the dole. Meanwhile, the city of Rome was a continuing burden: in the fourth century it had some 300,000 inhabitants receiving public distributions." p. 142 [The population of city of Rome at this time was perhaps 1 million.] "In the third century taxation had become so heavy as to consume the capital resources of taxpayers. In the fourth and fifth centuries it became even worse. As the sizes of both the military and the civil administrations doubled, taxes had to be raised from a weakened Empire to foot the bill. ... The Empire was by this time sustaining itself by the consumption of its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population. Continued investment in empire was creating not only a drop in marginal output, but also a drop in _actual_ output. ... Collapse was in the end inevitable, as indeed it had always been." p. 150. *** [The early Roman Empire was basically a Mediterranean-sized Ponzi scheme, which collapsed when they ran out of new "investors":] "From the middle of the third century B.C. ever increasing quantities of gold and silver flowed into the Roman treasury. The result was that the Roman people paid little or nothing for continuing conquests and for garrison costs. The captive populations underwrote the cost of further expansion. At this point in their history the Roman people were investing in a policy of territorial expansion (with associated rise in administrative costs), and reaped the return on their investment." p. 148. "Inevitably, though, this high rate of return could not be maintained. Three factors combine ultimately to lower the marginal return for any such policy. First, the number of profitable conquests declines. A geographically expanding state ultimately encounters a competitor with equivalent capabilities, whose conquest would be too expensive, if not impossible. ... Secondly, the logistics of transport and communication dictate that, beyond a certain distance from the capital, the lands will be difficult to govern. For the Roman Empire this was especially the case the farther one traveled inland from the Mediterranean sea lanes. ... Thirdly, once the accumulated surpluses of conquered nations have been appropriated, a conqueror must thereafter incur costs to administer, garrison, and defend the province. And when the accumulated surpluses have been spent, this must be paid for out of yearly income. Costs rise and benefits decline." p. 148-149. At 03:28 PM 7/16/2011, Simon Plouffe wrote:
The total being something like 62000 billion dollars, the interest of this is about 3000 billions dollars per year (at 5%).
The curve of US debt (as well as most of the others) is steadily increasing, if we extrapolate the curve for let's say 250 years :
First scenario, the international banking system will collapse and 3 countries might get pass this point , China, India and Russia, mostly because the amount of money the owe is ridiculous.
I am not sure I understand how you obtained your values. It seems that the kind of debt you are discussing is external debt, which is not the same as government debt. According to Wikipedia, external debt is "that part of the total debt in a country that is owed to creditors outside the country. The debtors can be the government, corporations or private households." In particular, external debt includes more than just money owed by the government, and it does not include money owed to creditors within the country. If you really want to discuss external debt, you also need to take into consideration external assets. A high external debt is not necessarily a huge problem as long as the external assets exceed the debt (i.e., the "net international investment position" is positive). This is the case for many of the countries at the top of your list, e.g., Switzerland, Luxembourg, Norway, Belgium, and Netherlands. (Belgium might still be in some trouble, but for other reasons.) Link with more countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_position The two kinds of debt are typically not closely related. For the U.S., they do happen to be approximately the same (if by government debt we mean the total amount owed by the government on all levels in the country as measured by the IMF), but this is a mere coincidence. Japan's government debt is five times its external debt. France's government debt, something like $1.8 trillion, is significantly less than its external debt, which amounts to $5 trillion. Luxembourg is an extreme case, its external debt being 170 times its public debt and its external assets being even greater. This is because the country is one of the major European centers of banking. Around 150 international banks (including banks from China, Japan and the U.S.) have branches in Luxembourg. One of those banks going bankrupt would certainly have an impact on Luxembourg's economy, but the effect would be substantially less devastating than for the country of origin of the given bank, as in the case of Iceland. (I guess Luxembourg''s greatest worry would be deposit guarantee payments, but apparently they only amount to €20000 per customer and bank.) Given the splendid net international investment position of Luxembourg, I don't think it is fair to say that the country is in trouble. At least, the country is very unlikely to be among the first to fall. Jakob Jonsson ________________________________________ Från: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] för Simon Plouffe [simon.plouffe@gmail.com] Skickat: den 17 juli 2011 00:28 Till: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Ämne: Re: [math-fun] the volume of the debt, us and france, or the volume of a pile of euros or american quarter. Hello, I my own computations, I took the CIA world fact book and computed the ratio of the debt to most of the countries, in my opinion these countries are technically bankrupt, the worst being Luxembourg, they owe 4 million dollars per person. I took the first 197 countries were the data was available, the countries that are in a bankrupt situation are in order Country ratio of debt and revenue per person Luxembourg 50.94 Monaco 18.20 Ireland 13.27 Netherlands 5.65 United Kingdom 4.27 Switzerland 4.25 Belgium 3.53 Denmark 3.07 Austria 2.51 France 2.39 Liberia 2.32 Portugal 2.18 Hong Kong 2.17 Norway 2.05 Finland 2.04 Sweden 2.02 Germany 1.86 Spain 1.77 Greece 1.66 Italy 1.34 Cook Islands 1.31 Latvia 1.18 Australia 1.08 Slovenia 0.99 United States 1.02 Canada is at the 34'th rank with a ratio of 0.79 So since, the debt of Luxembourg represent 51 times the annual revenue of a person then I am afraid they are doomed. The total being something like 62000 billion dollars, the interest of this is about 3000 billions dollars per year (at 5%). The curve of US debt (as well as most of the others) is steadily increasing, if we extrapolate the curve for let's say 250 years : First scenario, the international banking system will collapse and 3 countries might get pass this point , China, India and Russia, mostly because the amount of money the owe is ridiculous. Simon Plouffe _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
Hello, I took the external debt of the first 197 countries mainly from the cia world factbook. On this, for France, the external debt is 4698 billion dollars (US). As far as I know that debt has to take into account the total amount of debt that the government, public and local authorities owes. I know that Monaco and Luxembourg are places where there are a lot of banks, yes this is true. But the reasoning I made is in absolute terms, facts that for many of them like USA, the principal debitor is a country like China. I think that, if a country like Ireland, Greece or any important one is going bankrupt then it will pull the others in the drain as well. A good example is the RBC, Royal Bank of Canada, this is an example of a rich bank, now a good question is : Who is the owner of that Bank. The standard answer is 'the public' this is true and not true at the same time. For most of the voting shares in absolute number it is but in fact there are shares that are worthless in terms of ownership and others (very few) that have most of the voting power and ownership of the bank. In other words, the important share of the RBC is owned by international owners that are very difficult to identify precisely, I know, I tried to do that exercice once and found nothing. Go to the RBC site, read whatever available information there is about that bank and you will find that it is difficult to find a clear answer about that. I took into account the Lavoisier principle ; Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme. Another simple principe is ; if you want to understand something in that area : just point your finger in the direcation where the money is going and you will understand a lot of things. The amount of 14.3 billion dollars will have to be paid back to someone or something, in the mean time, if it is owed then someone is paying interest on it, the someone is us. Simon Plouffe
participants (5)
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Hans Havermann -
Henry Baker -
Jakob Jonsson -
James Cloos -
Simon Plouffe