But it's not a real comparison. It's just contextualizing.
If I say that a brachiosaurus was the size of a house, I'm not saying that your current dwelling is comparable to a 65-million-year-old pile of death and dust.
Huge numbers are essentially meaningless to the human mind. But "all economic output of Japan in a year" is something that most people can wrap their heads around a little more easily. We know it's a fairly rich, industrialized nation, and so therefore that's a crapton of money.
We all know they meant "in a year", but the article isn't explicit about it -- it just says
>> the output of the world’s third-largest economy
Not "annual", not even "GDP". I bet a lot of readers came away thinking "a shortfall as big as Japan".
And maybe not just lay readers -- a "smart but not knowledgeable" reader might try to convert the stock into a flow or vice versa by assuming some interest rate and doing a back-of-the-envelope net present calculation and be off from the real numbers by an order of magnitude.
His argument isn't about conception of scale, it's about a fallacy of units. The analogy would be comparing the annualized diameter increase of a tree to the width of CO2 molecules in a conversation about inputs to environmental policies. The CO2 molecue simply doesn't grow. You have to compare the rate of CO2 release.
If I say that a brachiosaurus was the size of a house, I'm not saying that your current dwelling is comparable to a 65-million-year-old pile of death and dust.
Huge numbers are essentially meaningless to the human mind. But "all economic output of Japan in a year" is something that most people can wrap their heads around a little more easily. We know it's a fairly rich, industrialized nation, and so therefore that's a crapton of money.