How It Works

The Long Number shows the distance between three points on the same scale: extreme poverty, you, and the fortunes of some of the world's most high-profile billionaires.

Doing this with pencil and paper would be very difficult. The first problem would be deciding how to divide the scale: hundreds, thousands, millions? With enough detail to see your distance from extreme poverty, you would need an enormous amount of paper to reach a billionaire's fortune. And if you made the scale smaller so everything could fit, the smaller amounts would end up almost on top of each other.

That is why we rarely see both extremes in the same infographic using the same scale. There simply is not enough space to show them together.

The Long Number uses something paper does not have: a screen you can keep scrolling through. Instead of trying to squeeze the whole distance into one space, it turns that distance into something you can travel through.

To begin, enter the amount in USD you would like to earn in a year. It does not have to be your real income: you can enter any amount and try as many different numbers as you like. The amount you enter is not stored permanently.

Using that number, The Long Number calculates your position on the scale and shows how far you are from extreme poverty. Next, choose the billionaire you want to compare yourself with from the menu.

When you do, The Long Number begins to zoom out so that their fortune can also fit on the scale. This lets you see something that is usually difficult to picture: your distance from extreme poverty compared with the much larger distance between you and a billionaire.

But The Long Number does not keep zooming out forever. If the whole distance were reduced until it fitted on a single screen, we would run into the same problem again: the smaller amounts would be too close together.

So, at a certain point, the scale stops getting smaller and the remaining distance becomes a journey. You can move through it one section at a time, and along the way different milestones help put the amounts you pass into context.

The journey ends when you reach the fortune you selected. And you can go back whenever you want: change the amount you would like to earn, choose another billionaire, and travel through the scale again.

The scale always stays the same.

What changes is where you start, how far you go, and what you find along the way.