million, billion, whatever

It's not just my mother who has no sense of the difference between $1 million and $1 billion.

When Goldman announced its recent investment in Facebook, she exclaimed in wide-eyed disbelief "That Mark Zuckerberg must now be worth millions!"

That understatement is understandable for an English teacher born during the depression. But how can you explain the Daily Beast's wild overstatement in its email to me this morning proclaiming "$900 Billion Lost at Afghan Bank"?

It's true, with talk these days of the US hitting a $1.5 trillion deficit, $900 billion may not seem that large a sum - in the US, at least. But you'd wish the smart editors at the Daily Beast would understand that $900 Billion is the kind of sum Afghanistan will not see in current lifetimes - let alone misplace at a bank.

Just to put in perspective, Afghanistan's GDP (that is the value of everything it produces in a year) is about $15 billion, compared to the US's $15 trillion. The Daily Beast's headline would be the equivalent of saying a "US bank lost $900 trillion dollars."

Now, the Daily Beast if hardly the only one to make these extreme numerical errors; they pop up all the time in reputable news reporting. But each time I see haywire numbers like these, I have to stop and wonder - if America's journalists, with their top college degrees and obsession with public policy, can't grasp the difference between millions, billions and trillions, how can we expect "average" Americans to?