"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers."

-- Richard Feynman

It seems totally arbitrary to compare the two. Is the national debt of smaller countries (with higher debt/gdp) OK because they’re below the number of stars and trees?

I guess it’s is in the spirit of the original article though…

Sure but a currency unit is somehow arbitrary, at least when it’s not backed by something at which you can point to, like weight of gold in a vault.

You can point to a star or a tree. Or even a coin or a banknote. But you can’t point to an abstract amount such as a national debt.

The way we measure gold, be it ounces or kilograms, is also arbitrary. Unless you count atoms.

... which is arbitrary as well?

It's actually counting the atoms.

Sure, but the number of atoms which a mol represents is just as arbitrary as a kilogram or an ounce.

If you think like that, then everything is arbitrary. Even the rules of logic are "arbitrarily" chosen. Sometimes you have to fix some notions to gain anything at all.

Not exactly. Only for quanta that are not inherently countable.

Let's not lose track of what this tread is about, shall we? It's "what is larger, the number of stars in the milky way or the national debt?" One of those values is countable. How many stars? The other one isn't. How many debts? That question doesn't make sense. You need to introduce a unit, and the choice of that unit is arbitrary.

So the price for gold is about 80000 $ per kg. So the debt is equal to 375000 metric tons of gold. Estimates say that in all history about 244,000 metric tons have been found: https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world

So the USA couldn't pay back its debt now even if it had all gold in the world.

Any State can unilaterally decide it will withdraw all debts it has ever contracted, and ta-da, no-one changed the definition of a debt but there is no debt anymore (which most likely wouldn’t be free of social consequences though).

On the other hands, if a group of humans want to declare that there is no tree or no star in the universe, the only trick they can leverage on to shrink the count is to change the definition of these words (ta-da, good bye Pluto).

Say USA had 375k metric tons of gold and wants to use it for paying the debt. This would just crash the gold price and the debt would be nowhere near serviced.

Well if the US had all the gold in the world then it will have cornered the market in gold. This would cause the price of gold to skyrocket and the US could trickle some gold into the market for immense profit. In this way the national debt could be serviced easily. Who cares about paying off the principle in a lump sum when you have a guaranteed revenue stream like that with gold?

Learned the other day about the 'Hunt Brothers' attempts to do something similar in the silver markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

> The brothers were estimated to hold one-third of the entire world supply of silver not held by governments.

It did not go well for them in the end, of course.

Another pair of traders, Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, had more success cornering the onion futures market [1]. It caused such a crisis in the price of onions (and significant onion spoilage) that Congress passed a law specifically banning the trade of onion futures contracts. One of the most bizarre trading stories and regulatory actions I’ve ever seen!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act?wprov=sfti1#

I should have remembered to mention "in addition to all the other gold currently owned by other parties."