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We’re drowning in numbers we don’t understand

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by Elena Gerstmann, opinion contributor - 04/23/26 8:30 AM ET

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by Elena Gerstmann, opinion contributor - 04/23/26 8:30 AM ET

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A screen displaying the US national debt is seen in the Manhattan borough of New York City on April 11, 2025. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Four astronauts flew around the Moon. Artemis II launched at the beginning of this month, and the crew was farther from Earth than any human has been in more than 50 years. The mission covered nearly 700,000 miles.

When you read that number, do you feel it? Or does it blur past like all the other large numbers in the news this week? Like the billions spent on the war in Iran, the $73 billion in domestic spending cuts proposed in the new federal budget, and the $1.5 trillion allocated for defense?

We are drowning in numbers, and we no longer understand what they mean. Every day, headlines bombard us with figures meant to inform: billions in spending, trillions in debt, percentages signaling growth or decline. But for most of us, these numbers blur together. They register as “large” or “small,” but almost never as real. And that is more than a math problem. It is a civic one.

We struggle because human intuition was never built for numbers this large.

I learned this from my stepfather, an amateur astronomer since childhood. In 1995, he rode his bicycle across the U.S., about 3,000 miles. The diameter of the Earth is roughly 8,000 miles, so if he could ride through the center of it, the trip would take about 18 weeks. The sun’s diameter is about 100 times that of Earth, so riding across it would take roughly 37 years — a long journey, but within a human lifetime.

The distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (not including our own sun), is something else entirely. It is about 24 trillion miles away. The Voyager spacecraft traveled at about 38,000 miles per hour, at which speed it would take roughly 74,000 years to reach the nearest star. That is not a long trip — it is a number that breaks the imagination entirely.

The same thing happens with the numbers that shape our economy and our government. One million seconds is about 11 days. One billion seconds is more than 31 years. A million dollars in hundred-dollar bills forms a stack a few feet high; a billion in Benjamins approaches the height of a skyscraper. A billion dollars, spent at a million dollars a day, would take nearly three years to exhaust.

The federal budget released earlier this month cuts nondefense spending by $73 billion while raising defense spending by $445 billion. Those numbers appear side by side in coverage as if they belong to the same category. They do not. The defense increase is six times the size of the domestic cuts. When we treat them as comparable, we misunderstand the trade-off entirely.

Percentages can be just as misleading. The same budget proposes cutting the National Science Foundation by more than 50 percent. That sounds like a compromise. It is not. It represents a dramatic reduction in capacity.

And when President Trump claims he will reduce prices by 500 percent or more, the problem is not boldness: It is mathematical impossibility. A 100 percent decrease reduces a price to zero. Anything more than that is nonsense.

This is not confined to one party or one ideology. Across the political spectrum, large numbers are used to persuade, alarm or obscure. The deeper problem is that most of us don’t know how to push back. When we cannot distinguish between millions and billions, or grasp what a percentage actually implies, we lose the ability to evaluate the choices being made on our behalf.

That has consequences.

Democracy depends on informed judgment. Budgets, policies and priorities are all expressed in numbers. If those numbers fail to communicate, if they land as impressions rather than facts, then public debate becomes untethered from reality.

The Artemis crew splashed down a few weeks ago. We celebrated, rightly so, and we returned to headlines full of numbers that most of us will process the same way we process the distance to Proxima Centauri: as something impressively large and essentially incomprehensible. We do not need advanced mathematics to fix this. But we do need better numerical intuition and a clearer sense of scale and proportion to understand what numbers actually represent in the world.

Numbers are not decoration. They are tools for understanding. And when we stop understanding them, we are not just making math mistakes.

We are making democracy mistakes.

Elena Gerstmann, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, a professional association focused on analytics, operations research and data-dri