Millions, Billions, Trillions of dollars are impossible for the human mind to properly contemplate. This game is a meditation on the vast sums of money that are thrown around casually by the richest individuals.
This game is heavily inspired by this game, which is much more educational, and this game, which is much funnier.
Written in Godot4.
This game is meant to be illustrative, not a rigorous accounting of costs. Here are some issues with the numbers used in this game:
- Not adjusted for inflation, though I try to make the sources as recent as possible.
- Does not account for costs at scale (e.g. making 8.1B doses of coronavirus vaccine would require the creation of new factories, extraction of various resources at a never before seen scale.)
- Does not account for distribution and secondary costs.
- Some projects are hard to estimate costs for (since they have never been done, like a moon base)
- Some projects talk only about building cost, but not the maintenance costs.
On the other hand, there are benefits that we aren't accounting for either. Many initiatives put money directly back into the economy (e.g. paying teacher salaries), and even the ones that don't have extremely positive returns on investment (e.g. every dollar invested into clean water provides a $6.08 return).
Sources, compiled in 2024:
- Supportive Housing
- This article claims it costs $12,800 per person per year, and that there are 580,000 people experiencing homelessness, so that's all 7.424 billion.
- Habitat for Humanity
- Dana Farber Cancer Institute
- Teacher Salaries
- Supporting artists
- Assumes you just pay them the median U.S. salary, $54K a year. link
- Amazon hourly worker pay (Amazon says $10B over 5 years)
- Bike lanes
- Building a public library
- Game of Thrones
- Graduate student loans
- Flint water crisis
- Malaria
- Cancer
- Coronavirus vaccines ($20.69 per dose, for 8.1B people. Obviously this does not account for the costs of distribution)
- Medical Debt
- Outstanding medical debt. Seems there's 81B of outstanding debt, and debt can be bought at an average ratio of 100:1 (though the article points out that starting to buy this debt would probably cause the price to raise.)
- Lift every American out of poverty for a year
- Clean water. Also this says each dollar invested into clean water provides $6.80 in return.
- Parental Leave
- Moon Base costs 35B to build and 73.5B to run for a decade.
- MBTA repairs
- Reforesting Land, apparently costs max out at $607 per acre.
- Haitian Earthquake
- Chernobyl
- BP oil spill (page 4 says the final bill could be up to 8.8B)
- Pensions of firefighters killed in 9/11
- Endangered Species
- Saving the lives of children
- HIV programs
- Red Cross Budget
- Ending world hunger
- Fiber optic cables (high speed internet)
- California high speed rail
- Student debt
- Drug development (mean cost 1335.9 million)
- James Webb Space Telescope
- International Space Station
- Winterize the texas Power Grid
- Superfund site cleanup
- GPT-4
- Quantum Computers
- Nuclear Power Plant
- Wind Turbine
- Solar Power and NYC energy usage
- Planet Earth Documentary
- New York Times Budget
- Infrastructure repairs Infrastructure repairs will cost 2600B over 10 years, so 260B a year.
- Harvard Operating Costs
- Pell Grants
- Seed funding for startup
- Doctors without borders
- Fukishima Disaster
- Number of medical students enrolled and cost of medical school