When I was growing up {which doesn't seem so long ago as it really was}, adults would sometimes ask me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
 
Somewhere around the sixth grade I began telling them that I wanted to be a chemist. It seemed like the perfect job: You got to mix up all kinds of neat stuff, you never knew exactly what would happen, and they paid you in the bargain. That pay, I still remember, was about $12,000 per year, a number my father was suitably impressed with.
 
Life intervened, and the government decided I should help fight the Cold War, instead. There I was introduced to computers. They were a lot different from chemistry, except for the "not knowing exactly what would happen" aspect of programming them.
 
Back in my "chemist" period, a million dollars was a princely sum. One could live quite comfortably off the interest, alone {even after the government took its share}. The question was: How did an aspiring millionaire amass such a sum, even at such a high salary as $12,000 per year?
 
We could look to the modern world, but I'm not sure it has the answer. Obviously, you have to accomplish big things to be paid that kind of money. Take, for instance, the former Citibank chairman, under whose watch $8 billion dollars in "don't ask, don't tell" mortgages were written off as a loss. For this politically correct lending approach, the departing chairman received $160 million as the Board showed him the exit. It's too bad for him that a million dollars isn't what it used to be.
 
Perhaps the answer is to become a class-action attorney. This gives you the feel-good moral superiority aspect of protecting the public from itself, while making lots of money. For instance, the attorneys' portion of one-third of the $368 billion cigarette lawsuit lottery winnings is nothing to sneeze at. The smokers got cancer; as one of the lead attorneys you got to be a billionaire.
 
Which brings us to our original question: When did a million become synonymous with a billion in the public mind? Mere millionaires are relegated to the poverty footnotes in Forbes these days. Yet it takes one-thousand millions of anything to make one single billion. So Citibank just wrote off eight-thousand millions of dollars in bad mortgages.. in just one quarter. How did we get to those kinds of numbers in business and public life?
 
It hasn't happened because of population growth. In 1950, our population had hit 150 million; we just recently passed the 300 million mark. So let's be charitable and say twice as many people bought widgets or widget-polishing services as used to. Yet an increase of a million to a billion is a one-thousand fold increase, not a mere doubling in widget-worshipers.
 
But let's indulge the world traders here: Imagine that 1 billion Chinese suddenly have the money to buy things we make, and they've all started doing so, all from us. That's six times as many customers for American corporations, assuming there was no Chinese competition.
 
In 1938, Time magazine reported that Bank of America had $12,321,000 half-yearly earnings. You had to look to their funds on deposit to reach the 1 billion mark: $1,498,527,000 to be precise. The bank's primary reason for its success? "To date {since 1935} Bank of America has loaned more than $200,000,000 for consumer purchases, more than $124,000,000 on FHA loans."
 
I guess everything is a lot more valuable today, right? Either that, or the dollars we use to pay for it are a whole lot smaller, and so we need lots more of them. A million is a billion; and if you're a geezer it happened in one single lifetime.