About A Hundred Dollars

clipped from article.nationalreview.com Charlie: Raymond, how much does a candy bar cost? Raymond: About a hundred dollars. Charlie: Raymond, how much does an automobile cost? Raymond: About a hundred dollars. The questions are designed to reveal a systematic flaw in the way Raymond looks at the world. For all his skill at counting the minutia in life (like toothpicks), he just doesn’t understand the issue of scale. He doesn’t have an inherent sense of how big things are. I’ve thought a lot about Rain Man over the past few months as I’ve been following the press coverage of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The story’s been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal nearly every day. Pretty much every show on CNBC — except Kudlow & Co. and one or two others — has been obsessed with the topic. Yet no one seems to be asking the Rain Man question: “How big is the sub-prime mortgage market?” And the answer, as Ben Stein makes clear, is not very big at all.