Justin Wolfers
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I am talking to a lot of people.
So let me give you a couple of very quick answers.
The first is the orders of magnitude involved with war are very, very large.
Second is what I think of as being the most important macroeconomic skill, which is being able to keep track of orders of magnitude.
To give an example, I was interviewed a bunch of times a week ago just after it came out that the Pentagon had said that the first week of the war cost $11 billion.
And commentators were like, oh, my God, $11 billion.
This is outrageous.
It's terrible.
It's too much.
And I'm like...
You know, actually, $11 billion is not that much.
$11 billion is, well, if there's 100 million households, you can do this for me, Ed.
Come on.
Don't put me in his position.
It's $100 per household.
It's $100 per household.
Not much.
But then you see markets today rose one and a half percentage points.
And as we talked about, that's a trillion dollars.