Wealth is good and all, but the companies involved also lead to products being more expensive, that wealth would go a lot farther with either regulations on land ownership or total reform of land ownership, free universities, universal healthcare, zoning reform and work reform
I dont want the money evenly distributed anymore. Now I want things to change entirely.
I don’t want their capital. I want their heads.
Mathematically, I think it’s hard for people to truly understand the obscene wealth that some people have accumulated. 100 billion doesn’t sound that different than 100 million.
100 million is magnitudes closer to ZERO than it is to 100 billion.
Imagine life was a game. You lived for 2025 years. You worked 260 days / year. You made the median US salary.
You would need to relive that process 3,145 times to match an Oligarch.
That amount of wealth is unethical while humanity suffers. No one can really fathom “1b dollars.”
Without spending
Even with all of the examples here and that I’ve seen around, it’s still something I know I don’t fully grasp. I’m also confident this is the same kind of limitation that flat earthers use when they say “Well I can’t comprehend the Earth being a sphere, it just looks flat to me.”
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is roughly 1 billion.
No. It’s a thousand. Which is closer to zero than a billion.Edit: You’re talking absolute values so the difference is 999 million.
While I was talking ratios hence the ratio being 1:1000. My bad.
It’s the best way I’ve found to illustrate to regular people how fucking massive the wealth accumulation is.
Just to be pedantic isn’t magnitudes in this case referring to order of magnitude that basically means in this case 1E X so 100 million would be 1E8 and 100 billion would be 1E11 so a difference of only 3 while difference to 1 would be 8 and to zero the difference is infinite
Yes, 100 billion is 3 orders of magnitude bigger than 100 million.
… … … … … … … … … …
This represents 1 Billion.
Each dot . represents 1 Million.
Now for the question: how many hours a day would you work to get more dots if you already had one Billion?
If I had 6 of those dots I would retire and have still have 12 dots leftover when I die.
I think it helps to convert the same ratios to easily understood dollars.
So $1 is to $1000 (one thousand) what $1000 dollars is to $1,000,000 (one million) is what $1,000,000 (one million) is to 1,000,000,000 (one billion).
Best illustration I had read was the “stairwell” analogy.
Each step is a net worth of +$100k.
10 steps on the staircase, you have $1M. Imagine being 10 steps up on the stairs - higher than most, but really you can still see them, relate…
Now if 10 stpes = 1M, 10,000 steps = 1B.
The empire state building is ~1500 steps. 1B is about 6.5 Empire State buildings of height.
Musk has a net worth of 450B.
That’s 450 x 10,000, that’s 4,500,000 steps, or about 3,000 Empire State buildings, or comfortably in low earth orbit.
So when you look down at those on ground floor or those 10 steps above ground, the difference to you is not only inconsequential, it’s literally unnoticeable
If the Empire State building has 1,500 steps, then 6.5 Empire State buildings would have 9750 steps
Hence why he said about
9750 ~ 10k
That’s a good one as well.
That would be in equity, not in cash, but it would mean each person would have secure housing, a secure retirement, reliable transportation, and reliable healthcare
Imagine how much less stressful life would be if the average person didn’t have to worry about paying rent and whether or not they will retire at the end of their life.
I work in mental health and I guarantee you a lot of mental illness is not “mental illness” but resource management issues masquerading as such
Not sure how you get secure housing out of that. If everyone is in the market for housing then prices are going through the roof.
Increase supply if housing isn’t a commodity, reduce pricing if housing is no longer a vehicle for retirement, end housing as a vehicle for capital so there are far less empty homes doing nothing, etc
It doesn’t solve the problem overnight (zoning reform is a big issue to address, for one) but it would alleviate a lot of key issues
I’ve got a wild idea, maybe if there is demand we can increase supply. Surely in this hypothetical communist world, we can also build some housing without every rich asshole trying to stop it in the name of maintaining their property value through scarcity.
We can’t solve that at a national level. That’s city (and state/province) government’s domain. City governments put roadblocks in the way of development because it’s popular with homeowners who want to see their investment grow.
A lot of countries are facing this issue, not just the US. I’m in Canada and in our big cities (especially Vancouver and Toronto) we arguably have it worse than the US. I don’t know how to solve it. It’s going to require convincing homeowners to let the value of their homes go down. Not exactly a winning political strategy!
Imagine how much less stressful life would be if the average person didn’t have to worry about paying rent and whether or not they will retire at the end of their life.
“That sounds horrible, we can’t make money in those conditions” is what the people standing in the way would say.
Eat the rich, embrace socialism, basically become a millionaire at some point
Vs whatever the fuck Reagan’s neoliberalism has got you
But the consequences - how we tell who is elite vs who is not? /S
People who do great works will earn prestige, honor and renown.
Yea
People could still be famous for being good actors, make good music or play sports well
They just wouldn’t be incredibly rich or multiple orders of magnitude richer than the common person
$400 million would allow me to build a tiny house completely off grid with all the equipment I’d need to grow vegetables in a remote location for the rest of my life… The other $398 would go to helping anyone and everyone.
Misread the amount but leaving up as a reminder of my idiocy.
Sorry, you only get $400 thousand, not $400 million.
Geeze… I really can’t read today.
To be fair, you could do that on 400k if you’re willing to be very frugal and handy.
I mean I know lots of people in the US who survive on 10k a year.
Haha you forgot about the trillions of debt. Thank you for coming to my Tex talk.
But those trillions in debt are literally held by private people as wealth. That’s what called bonds.
