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.
But also, billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting in the bank.
No, but some have billions of dollars in the stock market which they can use as a ‘bank’ anytime they want to buy something. Conveniently for them, all of that stock is unable to be taxed until it’s cashed out. Though, why would they ever cash out when they have the free money glitch using it as collateral? If they had it in the bank, then at least the interest could be taxed, I guess.
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. :-/
No one earns more than their labour could possibly produce. That labour however does have greater or lesser value to society, hence different pay rates.
My example above show that it’s impossible for any one human to earn that much even if they were immortal and had lived since Homo Sapien migrated out of Africa.
That we have billionaires shows that a very large amount of people have been paid far far less than their labour was worth.
That value extraction goes away when labour owns the means of production the employees own the company (i.e. employees are the shareholders and reap the dividends).
I was curious about this, so I looked it up. Apparently there were about 71,000 surgeons in the USA in 2022, according to the AAMC.
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.
They are parasites.