I was recycling some old magazines today, and I accidentally dropped the May issue of Quality Digest on the floor. It fell open to a page I had put a hard crease in. I looked at the page again and it still makes me go “Wow!”

It’s just a single sentence from the Statistically Speaking section:

“There are between 15,000 and 17,000 components in the average automobile made in the United States. In North America alone, 70,000 cars are delivered every business day.”

For those of you without a calculator, that’s over 1 billion components. Every day. Just in cars. In North America alone.

When I think about how that scales to the entire global economy for all products and services, it’s like trying to picture infinity.