Pick the guy you know with a large salary, let's say the best surgeon in your state. Someone who's exceptional, has studied their whole life and has a lot of responsibility. Let's say that surgeon makes a cool million a year. (Generally speaking, it would be closer to 800K) Now the best of the best in the country (1%) make up to 4 million a year.
How much billionaires make? Well, that every two hours.
So basically, we society are giving the same worth to one of these billionaires as 4380 of the best of the best surgeons.
One of the best conceptualizations of how much money the richest people have is to imagine stacking US dollars, but horizontally instead of vertically. Imagine there was a game where you could walk next to this stack and, when you stopped walking, you'd win all the money you walked past.
In just a few seconds you'd have earned over $10,000, a large sum for most people, but nobody would stop walking then. After just a minute you'd have $1,000,000, a life changing amount of money! What if you kept walking? What if you wanted to be in the top 100 richest in the world?
You'd die from exhaustion well before getting anywhere near the wealth of the top 100. It took only 1 minute to get a life changing amount of money, but it would take more than 4 days of continuous walking to make the $19,500,000,000 needed to crack the top 100.
I got this from this Tom Scott video where he drives for an hour on the highway in order to pass $1 billion.
No need to rely on imagination. Here’s Wealth, Shown to scale.
A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31.5 years.
But also, billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting in the bank. While I don’t think any individual should be that wealthy, it’s important to understand what wealth actually means. My own wealth is much more than just the money I can scrape together for next week.
Okay, I hear you, but I can totally keep up 4 days of walking. Just wanted to say.
I like this conceptualisation: let's say you need $20b to make the rich list.
If you earned $1m a year, you'd need to work for 20,000 years.
If you earned $1m a day, every day of the year, you'd still need 55 years: probably your entire working life. If you only worked weekdays, you need to work for 80 years: your entire life.
If you want to make it to the top ten: just add a zero to each of those numbers: 200,000 years, 550 years, 800 years.
That's a pretty good idea. I just dislike the concept of money being a resource. I would like to convey that money is just a bunch of IOY (I owe You) society prints to be exchanged for goods and services. Billionaires are receiving a lot of IOYs, but can we really say they're "earning" them?
That's why I'm comparing their "earnings" with our top of the top of the top, the people that work the hardest, know the most and provide a crucial service to society. (There are more, but their salaries are hilariously unfair, also known as teachers).
Sorry about the rant. :-/
Work is effort generating positive effects for everyone. Rent-seeking is extracting wealth from workers who actually contribute to the economy.
This group will also fight tooth and nail by lobbying, hiding assets, and opening specific bank accounts to avoid paying as much taxes as possible.
The top 1% are hoarders and I hope one day it's identified as a detriment, as other hoarding is, within the DSM.
Bunch of dragons with no St. George in sight.
They are parasites.
Neoclassical economists say rich people contribute to the economy by "allowing people to use their capital," but allowing someone to do something isn't work, it's the absence of work. If I disallow someone to use my factory machines, it would require work for me to prevent them from using it, as I would have to get the police involved or at least some sort of private security. Allowing someone to use something is just choosing not to do anything, and supposedly they would have us believe that capitalists not doing anything contributes to the economy.
damn i am providing so much value right now by not burning every building in the city down
But, I hear the rich are delicious on toast.
Better then avocados on toast.
I wouldn't do that disservice to my toast
Love it.
CuredFührerd meats are bad for your health anyways.
BuT tHeY pRoViDe JoBs
/s
My labor produces food packaging for literally tens of millions of food packages every day, and that scaling is even after you divide it up by the number of people we've got doing it, so it's conceivable that certain capacity to organize things is so extremely valuable.
That said, our billionaires are not that.
organizing work is extremely valuable, but that doesnt mean that it takes hard work to do...
the work can be hard, but never harder than the lowest paying jobs in the same proportions as the pay difference.
Thanks for this, it's very clarifying.
