Virtually everyone fails to grasp exactly how large of a number a billion is. It’s so, so much bigger than the ”very big number” people think of when they hear the word.
The point, obviously, is that talking about billionaires as if they have billions of dollars in cash, and drawing a direct comparison between their net worth and attaining an amount of cash, linearly, over a stretch of time, is, obviously, disingenuous and deliberately misleading.
Wealth is often measured in currency. That's why they are not called houseionaires or equityionaires and the like. For simplicity's sake, the combined value of their assets is then often reduced to a single translation into, for example, dollars. One countable sum signifying net worth. Glad you could learn something today.
Just because a boulder is sitting at the top of a hill that, if pushed down it, could reach a speed of 50 mph, doesn't mean it's going 50 mph while it's sitting there at the top of the hill.
Hope you've learned some basic economics today, condescending oaf.
If the experts agree that this rock's top speed is 50 mph and rocks were generally sorted by their realisable top speed and everybody wrote about this rock being a 50 mph rock, then the number that would be assigned to this rock would be 50 and not 0. A billionaire isn't worth zero because he has no cash lying around. Btw, If you wanna devolve into petty insults, you have to tell me in advance because while you seem to be into it, it's not really my thing.
I wonder if world class mathematicians have a much better grasp of it — and yet fail to use their expertise to point out the absurdity of the current wealth inequality
Or do even they, world class mathematicians, not really ‘grasp’ it in this wildly important and urgent sense.
100% and, more so, thats not just a billion in cash, of course. Thats a billion dollars worth of stuff that makes you money, that can be sold off for at least a billion, most likely far more.
When people read these valuations, they often think to themselves "surely they can't be worth that much" and they're right. It will always be much, much more. Other than Trump, wealth valuations are always very, very conservative, due to the nature of how they do it, and thats before we get to the fact that they're only estimating their wealth on the assets that are publicly disclosed.