My older girl’s math teacher is trying to impress upon her seventh graders the power of exponential growth.
A traveling farm worker offers to work in a farmer’s field every day for a month. He wants to be paid 1 cent for the first day, 2 cents for the second day, 4 cents for the third, and so on—each day, twice as much as the day before. The farmer accepts after calculating that he would not have to pay the man as much as a dollar a day until the start of the second week. Was this wise? How much will the worker earn on day 10? Day 20? About how much, total, for the month?
If you’re familiar with this or similar exercises, you know that the upside for the farmer, assuming he honors the agreement, is that he can probably leave off worrying about the estate tax. If the work day is long, the daily wage attains the current federal minimum at about the month’s midpoint. By day 20, however, the worker gets more than $5000. On the last day of the month (30), he gets more than $5 million. For the month, his pay is about $10.74 million.
I plan to reveal my view of Israel’s treatment of its neighbors on the day this blog logs its 2^20 page view. That should give it more than enough time to settle and annex all the disputed territory, and my anti-Semitism will remain a secret to all reading these words.
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