I don’t really understand your initial assumption. What if someone has 10 million dollars? Would you say he has 0.01 billion?
I think that your theory has some merit, but I believe it’s more apparent when we describe the people who own the money, as opposed to the money itself: A millionaire will stay a (multi)millionaire until they become a billionaire.
I think the idea is that we still think of someone who has >1 million but <1 billion as having some number of millions of dollars, rather than subdividing “millions” into “millions,” “tens of millions,” and “hundreds of millions.” Of course we do subdivide that when we’re being particular about how incredibly rich some actor is or something, but generally they all fall on the same order of magnitude in our minds.
I don’t really understand your initial assumption. What if someone has 10 million dollars? Would you say he has 0.01 billion?
I think that your theory has some merit, but I believe it’s more apparent when we describe the people who own the money, as opposed to the money itself: A millionaire will stay a (multi)millionaire until they become a billionaire.
I think the idea is that we still think of someone who has >1 million but <1 billion as having some number of millions of dollars, rather than subdividing “millions” into “millions,” “tens of millions,” and “hundreds of millions.” Of course we do subdivide that when we’re being particular about how incredibly rich some actor is or something, but generally they all fall on the same order of magnitude in our minds.