I don’t mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.
I think many will say yes, they can be, though it may be rare. I was tempted to. I thought more about it and I wondered, are you really a good person if you’re hoarding enough money you and your family couldn’t spend in 10 lifetimes?
I thought, if you’re a good person, you wouldn’t be rich. And if you’re properly rich you’re probably not a good person.
I don’t know if it’s fair or naive to say, but that’s what I thought. Whether it’s what I believe requires more thought.
There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn’t care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.
And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?
Very curious about people’s thoughts on this.
Yeah this is missing magnitudes of scale here. Someone with 100,000 and someone with 1,000,000,000 are wildly different scales of magnitude. It’s like people who look at a mag-4, mag-5, and mag-6 earthquake. Each of those is on a log scale, so while you’re just going form 4 to 5, the scaling means that’s a massive amount of change.
Same diff here. The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change. So going from 100,000 to 1,000,000 is a pretty big change in the amount of security one has. So going from 1e5 to 1e9, that’s a change of 1000 on the scale. The level of change between those two is absolutely astronomical.
I get this facet of mathematics eludes folks. All the while the whole “double the number of grains per square on a chessboard” thing we all like to play with because it’s interesting. But this is that IRL. The average person and the average billionaire are on two totally different scales. It’s like saying, “why a beetle doesn’t glow when the sun does?” Like you can’t reasonably compare those two things. Yeah, both contain hydrogen at some level but in massively, massively different quantities. It’s like saying, your computer is just an overgrown abacus. It’s just ignoring scale so much that it veers into very wrong.
I get what you’re trying to say. But you’ve got to acknowledge the vast difference of scale here and that your point is not just oversimplification of an issue, but a gross by planetary magnitudes oversimplification of an issue. Just mathematically speaking, the average person and the average billionaire are not even close to the same kind of person in economic terms. It’s just completely unreasonable to even remotely think they are. The numbers are just too far apart, to even attempt this argument in good faith.
This is a great point, and the same logic applies to someone who’s destitute vs someone with the median net worth of about $100,000. The average person could give away half of their net worth to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn’t ruin their life, but we don’t. We’re all less guilty of ignoring the suffering of others that a billionaire is, but not without blame.
The average person could give away half of their net worth to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn’t ruin their life
Maybe the average person in YOUR social circle lol
I love when people say something highly specific to their social class but frame it as “everyone”. Bubbles, man.
This is a great point, and the same logic applies to someone who’s destitute vs someone with the median net worth of about $100,000.
See this is where you failed logarithms. Let’s talk domestic and then we’ll move on to developing world. To explain it a bit better here’s a breakdown. Let’s say I take all my net worth and sell it. Lock, stock, and barrel. Convert it to cash and then take 50% of that dollar amount and hand it to someone. That value will allow a single person to have an apartment, furnish it, and pay rent for about 48 months. Now take the same billionaire and put it towards that same person. That 50% of that dollar amount is 43 times more money than if you completely liquidated the entire town of 12,000 in middle of nowhere Tennessee I live in. The billionaire could purchase forty-three of my towns. I can grant someone an apartment for maybe four years.
It’s all the same 50%, but because of MATH, it’s wildly different in what is possible with that same 50%. That’s the “great point” you should be walking away with. Logarithms and orders of magnitude are wild things!
Now let’s move to international. Minus the whole point I just made, one would think, oh if I give some money overseas, they’ll be able to go to Walmart and grab some rice. Well they don’t have Walmart. If I gave them $50k it is about as worth $0 because there’s nowhere for the money to go that’ll directly help them. It’s not till I give them enough money to actually build the Walmart (or whatever shopping center, or you can call the Walmart farming equipment, or access to seed and fertilizer, or whatever basically enough money to grant them access to a resource that is just removed completely from them).
That’s the thing people forget about abject destitution. They are so poor and exist in an environment that is so resource poor, handing them $100,000 might help keep them warm at night by burning the cash. But they are SO poor, you need a massive injection of funds to literally kick start their economy, and surprise $100,000, a quarter million, or half a million ain’t going to cut it. You need nine figures to even get started and that massively ignores the complexities of the geopolitics and the fun details of despotism. But I side step all of that for simple fact that we just need to keep this to math and what I had previously indicated.
The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change.
A developing nation’s economy is in 1e-n territory for the median buying power relative to the US dollar. So for large n, you need large positive exponents to compensate. If some economy relative to the US dollar is 1e-6 for purchase power, then me sending 1e5 in funds is still fractional buying power on the order of like 0.1 relative to the dollar.
to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn’t ruin their life
The feeding you have to remember is someone here in the US buying the food and then sending the food. We buy the food at US prices, so it’ll feed at the same rate it feeds a US mouth, because we didn’t buy it at developing world nation price, we bought it at US price. We buy the food in the US because those nations are so poor, they do not even have food to buy for them to eat, you have to bring all the money required to invent all of that there.
So like I said, that whole 50% means vastly different things in terms of different log base. It’s all the same 50%, yes, but it’s wildly different values.