We’ve all heard the phrase “bigger is better”, but is this really so. It certainly is if you’re talking about winning a lottery jackpot and there are many other examples where most would agree that bigger is better. However, it occurs to me that there are also many important examples where bigger is definitely not better. There are the obvious examples such as a personal injury or illness, an earthquake or a whole spectrum of problems that one might imagine. Additionally, there are many cases where the answer might not be so obvious. Is a large battleship always better than the smaller destroyer? Is a large company always more likely to be successful than a smaller company? Is large government always better than small government? No doubt you’ve been with me up until this last question, which is quite likely to strike a political nerve in most and one that will only be addressed tangentially.
The current situation where our government seems to be incapable of dealing with an annual budget for the country much less our enormous national debt, will be addressed a bit later on. First of all let’s consider more general problems that can exist for something big. At the outset, I would suggest that the question is not whether something is too big or too small but whether it is the optimum size for its intended role or use. For example, the previously mentioned case of a destroyer being able to out maneuver a battleship is representative of a number of military situations. While we’ve heard it said that it takes half an ocean to turn around a battleship, smaller ships, in comparison, can turn on a dime. Thus, smaller ships may have an advantage in navel battles by out maneuvering the much larger battle ships. Similarly, in air battles, small fighter jets can get the best of the larger bombers. On the other hand, both battleships and bombers can inflict much greater damage on the enemy when attacking land based targets, the battleships by virtue of their huge, long-range, 16 inch guns and the bombers by virtue of their high altitude bombing capability. What may be too big or, conversely, too small in one case may well be optimal in another. I think that this is generally true and, relatively non-controversial, when we are talking about hardware or tools of any type. However, it is quite a different matter when we look at human organizations.
Companies can be too big if they are unable to quickly adjust to changing market conditions. We’ve recently observed this in the case of the U.S. auto industry. In the 1950s, virtually all cars sold in the U.S. were made in America by American Companies. Then in the ensuing decades while the American companies became big, fat and lazy, the leaner and hungrier foreign automakers came in and won over a large segment of the American market by offering superior products. By the time the American companies realized what was happening, their large size and organizational complexity prevented them from quickly responding and they lost a major share of the American automobile market. This has also happened in other industries. Eastman Kodak once had a virtual monopoly on the U.S. camera market but they became so enamored with the profitability of selling film that they lost their dominant position first with the introduction of high quality Japanese cameras and, most recently, with the advent of digital photography. A number of the other large and once most successful companies have fallen behind the curve because they have not demonstrated sufficient flexibility in keeping up with a changing business environment. Apple has been on a meteoric rise on the backs of a series of highly successful technical innovations. One wonders if the day will come when they too will be left in the dust by leaner, more flexible, technology innovators. Certainly, the rapid rate of change in technology demands that a company stays on its toes with the ability to, not only quickly shift direction as the business environment changes, but also remain vigilant in being able to predict evolving trends and see changes coming.
Government is becoming too big when the efficiency of its operations begins to decline as its growth increases. At this point it’s tempting to launch into an extensive discussion of the dynamics of this relationship and the critical role that human nature plays. However, that is an extensive topic that I would rather leave for exploration in the future. For now, I will only point out that although both companies and governments are human organizations, there is a major difference in their motivations. In both cases, members of the organizations seek success. Companies are successful when the make money, i.e. create wealth. Governments do not create wealth. They can only consume wealth or redistribute wealth. Thus, their success is measured by their ability to maintain power. In most autocratic governments, leaders maintain power by being stronger than their opponents. In democracies or republics such as the U.S. where elections are held, leaders need to be favored by a majority of the voters. Herein lies the root of the problem. Leaders with sufficient control of the government can shower groups of voters with favors and, in effect, buy their votes. Although, I intend to discuss this in detail at a later time, I need to point out that this is exactly what we are currently living through. The result of irresponsible government spending has taken us to the brink of economic disaster as we are currently faced with huge national debt totaling more than $14 trillion. Yes, governments can certainly become too large.
Finally, we need to talk about numbers themselves. When numbers are very large, they can surpass our ability to comprehend their significance. The above number, 14 trillion, is a case in point. Most people hearing that number only recognize it as something really big but they are unable to truly understand its magnitude. They have no meaningful frame of reference by which to judge it. If they see it written out as a pure number with all its zeros, i.e., 14,000,000,000,000, they’ll say “wow, that’s really big”. But, it’s not until you put it into some frame of reference they can relate to, that they really begin to understand its size. For example, ask them to calculate how long they would have to work, earning $1000/hr, to make $14 trillion. When they do the calculation and realize that it would take them nearly 16,000 years to earn that much money even at that exceedingly high salary, they begin to gain some feeling for how large our national debt is. Looking at the debt in another way, it implies that each man, woman and child in the U.S. (2010 population ~ 308 million) is in debt to the tune of about $45,000. I don’t know about you, but for me that’s scary big.
Another example of the trouble with “big” relates to the size of the universe and the significance of our planet in that context. There was a time when it was generally regarded that the earth was at the center of the universe and all the heavenly bodies, including the sun, revolved around the earth. In fact, the Catholic Church jailed Galileo for suggesting that the earth might actually be revolving around the sun. We now know that earth and even our sun are virtually insignificant specs in a vast universe. It’s claimed that the observable universe is a sphere with a radius of 46 billion light years. Here again we have a very big number and unless you are a cosmologist, you probably have little if any comprehension of just how big it is. In order to even begin to understand its size, we need to convert light years to miles. No one has ever traveled a distance of a light year but they have traveled numbers of miles. A light year is the distance light can travel in a year. The speed of light is about 186,000 miles/sec. Thus, in a year, light would travel 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 or nearly 6 trillion miles. Thus, the size of the universe is a sphere with a radius of about 276 billion trillion miles. Obviously, this has gotten us nowhere except to a more complex hopelessly big number that no one can comprehend. In other words, the universe is so large that most humans are unable to even begin to conceive of its size. In this regard, another frame of reference has been cited. That is that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the earth. Does that help much? I don’t know about you but it doesn’t help me much. I gave up long ago when I tried to estimate how many grains of sand were in my sand bucket.
Yes, that’s the trouble with “big”. We often can’t understand “big”, it can be problematic and big things can even eat us.
Other Exercises To Examine “Big”:
1. How much total energy does the sun emit in a day? Is there really an energy crisis? It’s been calculated that the sun emits more energy in 1 second than the total of all that utilized by human activity during the entire 100,000 years that humans have been on the earth.
2. How big is Donald (“The Donald”) Trump’s ego?
3. How much fecal matter and other waste (this document excluded) has been produced by humans during the entire 100,000 years that humans have been on the earth?
4. Does infinity actually exist? If so, in what sense and what is the next smallest number? If not, what is the largest number there is (to the third decimal place is good enough)?
Additional examples welcomed.
