Wealth, shown to scale
Wealth, shown to scale
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$1,000
$68,000 (Median US household income)
$1 Million
$1 Billion
$185 billion (wealth of Jeff Bezos)
$80 million
Jeff is so wealthy, that it is quite literally unimaginable.
We rarely see wealth inequality represented to scale. This is part of the reason Americans
consistently under-estimate<br>the relative wealth of the super rich.
Every 10 pixels you scroll is $5 million.
OK, we're coming up on the end now.
Lol, just kidding, we're about a third of the way. Keep scrolling though, there's more to see.
Let's put this wealth in perspective by comparing it to some familiar things.
All the money you will ever earn in your entire life from the day you are born until the day you die (about $1.7 million).
Annual cost of health care for a family of four.
Annual pay of an Amazon warehouse worker.
Annual cost to house every homeless US veteran.
Annual cost of chemotherapy for all cancer patients ($9 billion)
On July 20th 2020 Jeff Bezos made $13 billion in a single day.
Even the fortunes of very rich people are dwarfed by the incomprehensible wealth of the 0.0001%.
Wealth of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon ($50 million)
Wealth of Beyoncé ($400 million)
Wealth of Apple CEO Tim Cook ($625 million)
Lifetime earnings of a doctor, on average ($6.7 million)
Lifetime earnings of a lawyer, on average ($4 million)
Lifetime earnings of a hedge fund manager, on average ($84 million)
These people may see themselves as fabulously rich, and often oppose policies aimed at reducing inequality.
But many have not fully grasped the enormous gulf between themselves and the super rich.
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Mark<br>Zuckerberg<br>($116 billion)
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$200 million
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We can have a world in which wealthy people exist, without handing nearly all money to the super rich.
No single human needs or deserves this much wealth.
400 richest Americans ($3.2 trillion)
$80 million
Jeff Bezos may be insanely rich, but it is a drop in the ocean compared to the combined wealth of his peers.<br>The 400 richest Americans own about $3.2 trillion, which is more than the bottom 60% of Americans.
400 people
Bottom 60%<br>(Scroll Down)
0.0%
A trillion dollars is such a large figure, that you might as well say "eleventy gajillion zillion dollars."<br>So in this section, we will try to understand the scale of this figure by looking at what could be accomplished with various chunks of this wealth.
Some will argue that using this wealth for public benefit is not possible, because it's "tied up" in stocks, and therefore inaccessible.<br>This is just not true.
As we proceed, try to keep in mind: all of this wealth is controlled by a group so small,<br>that they could fit on a single 747 airplane—with 260 seats left over.
What could we do with under 10% of this money?
6%
Vaccinate every human on earth against coronavirus
Based on the cost of vaccines
and the cost of delivery, it would take around
$200 billion to vaccinate every person on earth, which is about 6% of the wealth currently controlled by 400 Americans.
After paying for this vaccination program, these individuals would still be $40 billion richer than they were before the pandemic.
setting aside the desperate humanitarian need for a global vaccination, there is still a strong self-interested argument that wealthy countries should do it: the longer covid circulates in the world, the more chance of a
vaccine resistant variant and undoing all the vaccine progress we've already made.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently organizing a global vaccine donation program which aims to vaccinate
about 20%
of residents in poor countries by the end of 2021, and even that approach has
substantial funding shortfalls .
3%
Permanently eradicate malaria
Malaria is one of the worst infectious diseases ever visited on mankind, possibly killing more people than any other infectious disease in history. In the 20th century alone, malaria killed more people than the Black Death.
Annual Malaria deaths<br>(409,000)
deaths in<br>all of human history<br>(about 15,000)
These figures are even more shocking when you learn that malaria overwhelmingly kills children; around two-thirds of malaria deaths each year are children under five. That's around 275,000 children.
under five killed by malaria each year<br>(Scroll Down)
10
All these deaths are preventable. Treating and preventing malaria is a well understood science, universally practiced in the developed world.
It is estimated<br>that malaria could be globally eradicated by 2030 for a cost around $1.84 per at-risk person per year, or around $100 billion total.<br>This would be around 3% of the wealth currently possessed by the 400 richest Americans.
Around 800 children will die of malaria today. A small group of super rich people could...