One billion: that big number that uses three commas to separate nine zeros. Billionaire: someone who can flaunt three commas.

Celebrity investor Marc Cuban has taken up the “three commas” mantra. In 2015, he co-launched a brand of the same name, selling t-shirts bearing these punctuation marks. Interesting business, this “aspirational brand.” Even if you include billionaire wannabes with the few, like Cuban, who have that much wealth, the market seems very limited. Or is there another way to look at it?

There’s a billion in your pocket

According to a recent article in the WSJ by Andy Kessler, we’re all billionaires now. He pulls off this accounting trick by looking at several technological advances:

• Measured in terms of the bit-per-dollar capability of memory chips from 1970, one of today’s smart phones with 32 GB of memory would easily be worth a billion dollars.
• The same thing applies to the cost structure of the millions of instructions per second (MIPS) enabled by computers from the 1980s – today’s 4 GHz quad-core is worth another billion.
• And so it goes for broadband speeds, genetic sequencing and information collecting.

This is a novel approach to a perennial question: What is wealth, and how do you measure it? It reminds me of the Economist’s famous Big Mac Index, created in 1986 as a way to measure purchasing price parity (PPP) between two currencies. The idea of using the famous hamburger was “to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible.”

Measuring wealth either across borders or decades is a challenge. Kessler’s approach squares up with the actual assets of only tiny fraction of humanity. But by going back a few decades and using standard units of measurement, he points to how value has increased in some instances by many orders of magnitude.

To sum up: fresh perspective using common points of reference; funny and serious at the same time. A few more reasons why Kessler is one of my favorite business and tech writers.