1+1=2

2-3=1

20+74+823=917

20-74-823=-877

I can’t really display it in this format, so you’ll just have to trust my anecdotal evidence, but it took me longer to add and subtract the larger strings than it did to do the smaller strings. However, the process I used to add and subtract the numbers was not any more or less difficult to do, it just took longer.

So this introduces the concept of time efficiency and calculability. As we can see, no matter how big or small the number gets the act of adding them and subtracting them does not become more or less difficult, it just takes more or less time. So really, we shouldn’t talk about how difficult it is to calculate but rather how long it takes.

When we compare two numbers that are very small, there is often a large difference between them. Take for example 2 and 1. 2 is twice as large as 1; it’s 100% larger. But when we compare 12 and 11, we see that 12 is only about 9% larger. Think of this as “total increase” for the next section.

Economies on a national scale are very complex and have millions of moving parts. Therefore, the time it will take to calculate them is extremely large. However, if we add a second economy to the calculation this “total increase” doesn’t actually make it significantly more difficult to calculate since we’re already high on the calculation complexity curve.