(04-22-2020, 08:10 PM)Alan V Wrote:(04-22-2020, 07:19 PM)SYZ Wrote:(04-22-2020, 06:43 PM)Alan V Wrote: Ask yourself this: If you took all the money controlled by the wealthiest individuals in a given nation and divided it among the poor, would it be enough for everyone...
More than 123,000 Australian parents and their children are homeless every day in Australia. We have
around 30 billionaires here, and doing a beer-mat calculation of their wealth gives me a figure of $976,000
for each of those families.
And if we also include the 800,000 workers who've lost their jobs, that figure is $130,000 each.
—Could I live comfortably with a handout like that? You betcha!
(Although, admittedly, this is all very ultra-hypothetical.)
I would guess that the money poorer countries need actually resides, for the most part, in wealthier countries. So I guess the question becomes: If the total wealth of the world was evenly distributed across borders, would it be enough for everyone? That might be a positive answer. Or it might make it so previously-wealthier people could no longer afford to live in their own countries.
These are interesting thought experiments.
The total wealth of the world, in GWP terms, is about one hundred trillion dollars. Divided by seven billion humans (obviously a back-of-envelope calculation), that comes out to about $14,000 US for every man, woman, and child on Earth.
That sure doesn't cut it in SoCal, because aside from aggregates like the above math, there's also things like demand and local inflation, local productivity and resources, CoGS produced by each area, and so on.
But if life were isotropic, every person on Earth could probably get plenty to survive and sock some away. Unfortunately, life isn't isotropic.
On hiatus.
