One percent wealth, 50 percent sweating it out
When 80 people own the same amount of wealth as 3.5 billion people, something is seriously wrong with the system. There isn’t even a good way to quantify this because we are dealing with numbers that people cannot even comprehend. Get much past what an individual makes in a year or has held at any one time, and it becomes extremely difficult to create a picture that brings the whole idea into focus. The difference is so large that it sends my calculator into scientific notation with 7 zeros in front of a two as a decimal if I remember how that works correctly.
The Solar System
The sun is 93 million miles from the Earth. It takes about 8 minutes for light to go from the sun to our planet. If the sun were 3.5 billion miles away, it would be about 37 times further away than it is now. Light would take about 5 hours to get to the Earth. It would place the Earth somewhere between Uranus at 2.7 billion miles and really close to Pluto’s average orbit at 3.67 billlion miles. When you have to talk about numbers related to economics in terms of distances in space, it really is out of this world. Such inequality should be alien to our planet.
The Picnic
Imagine 3,500,000,080 ants show up at a picnic. With that many ants, the picnickers run away and the ants split what is left. Unfortunately, the ants arrived late and the only thing they find are two uneaten Saltine crackers. The first 80 ants run to one of the crackers and set up a system to ensure that the rest of the ants will have to share the other cracker. The only problems with asking you to imagine such a scene is that there is nothing that most of us have experienced that could represent 3.5 billion, and it leaves a lot of hungry ants.
May the odds be never in your favor
Even if it were represented as odds reduced to a smaller number, you would be looking at 350 million to 8, or 175 million to 4. Even the odds of winning Powerball are significantly better than the numbers here – 1 in 146 million, no ‘b’ in sight. Winning the lottery is a dream. What is being one of the richest 80 people in the world?
In time (with a little help from snopes.com and some math skills), 3.5 billion seconds ago, it was about 1920. Walt Disney hadn’t even arrived in California yet. The Roarin’ ‘20s weren’t even a name. 3.5 billion minutes ago, it was 3688 B.C. The oldest free standing building in Gozo, Malta was built – the Ggantija temple complex. We don’t know much about the builders at all.
There is no reasonable way to justify this type of inequality. There are not 80 people in the world who have contributed so much to society that they deserve wealth larger than most minds can fathom. (I guess Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein might be able to conceive numbers these large; the rest of us are lost.)
These top 80 people are not smarter than the 3.5 billion below them. They do not work harder than the 3.5 billion below them. They just continue to leech wealth from the system and hope that the good capitalists of the world, who equate their economic system with their political system and inject Darwin into economics while denying him in their religion, will continue to be loud enough to drown out the voices of reason. As long as people in the lower 99 percent believe that they can better their individual situations in a system that is stacked against them so much more than any casino could dream, the richest individuals will continue to keep the rest of the planet poor.
The Solar System
The sun is 93 million miles from the Earth. It takes about 8 minutes for light to go from the sun to our planet. If the sun were 3.5 billion miles away, it would be about 37 times further away than it is now. Light would take about 5 hours to get to the Earth. It would place the Earth somewhere between Uranus at 2.7 billion miles and really close to Pluto’s average orbit at 3.67 billlion miles. When you have to talk about numbers related to economics in terms of distances in space, it really is out of this world. Such inequality should be alien to our planet.
The Picnic
Imagine 3,500,000,080 ants show up at a picnic. With that many ants, the picnickers run away and the ants split what is left. Unfortunately, the ants arrived late and the only thing they find are two uneaten Saltine crackers. The first 80 ants run to one of the crackers and set up a system to ensure that the rest of the ants will have to share the other cracker. The only problems with asking you to imagine such a scene is that there is nothing that most of us have experienced that could represent 3.5 billion, and it leaves a lot of hungry ants.
May the odds be never in your favor
Even if it were represented as odds reduced to a smaller number, you would be looking at 350 million to 8, or 175 million to 4. Even the odds of winning Powerball are significantly better than the numbers here – 1 in 146 million, no ‘b’ in sight. Winning the lottery is a dream. What is being one of the richest 80 people in the world?
In time (with a little help from snopes.com and some math skills), 3.5 billion seconds ago, it was about 1920. Walt Disney hadn’t even arrived in California yet. The Roarin’ ‘20s weren’t even a name. 3.5 billion minutes ago, it was 3688 B.C. The oldest free standing building in Gozo, Malta was built – the Ggantija temple complex. We don’t know much about the builders at all.
There is no reasonable way to justify this type of inequality. There are not 80 people in the world who have contributed so much to society that they deserve wealth larger than most minds can fathom. (I guess Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein might be able to conceive numbers these large; the rest of us are lost.)
These top 80 people are not smarter than the 3.5 billion below them. They do not work harder than the 3.5 billion below them. They just continue to leech wealth from the system and hope that the good capitalists of the world, who equate their economic system with their political system and inject Darwin into economics while denying him in their religion, will continue to be loud enough to drown out the voices of reason. As long as people in the lower 99 percent believe that they can better their individual situations in a system that is stacked against them so much more than any casino could dream, the richest individuals will continue to keep the rest of the planet poor.