11 ms·

I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. People generally think of normal(ish) distributions like height, where if you're

by kens 9y ago

I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. People generally think of normal(ish) distributions like height, where if you're 10% taller or shorter than average, you're a tall or short person, and 40% taller makes you the tallest person in the world. In comparison, wealth has a very, very long tail, making it hard to comprehend. Here's what I've come up with to visualize wealth in the United States. Suppose you start counting, going up by 1 million dollars every second, and people sit down when you reach their net worth. Most people will sit down immediately. After about 9 seconds, people in the "1%" will start sitting down. Near the 17 minute mark, billionaires would start sitting down. Donald Trump would sit down just before the hour mark. A day later - an hour and 10 minutes into the second day of billionaires sitting down - Bill Gates would sit, followed by Jeff Bezos just three minutes later. The point of this is there's a huge range of billionaires (analogous to comparing 17 minutes to a day). The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds). (I should also mention that there should be huge error bars on reported net worth numbers.)

ttoinou 9y ago
Why not rather think about wealth on a log scale ?
- sushisource 9y ago
  Log scales aren't intuitive to humans. I think it's a great example because that's sort of what it tricks you into doing.
  - welterde 9y ago
    One would think it would be since we hear and see in log scale.
    - zild3d 9y ago
      Yes we hear in log scale, but why would that be intuitive? Ask someone how loud or soft any sound is - a dog bark, a cymbal crash, a whisper - and you won't get a numeric response. We're used to measuring distances, weights, etc but not volume, aside from the volume knob which goes from 0-100%, and the logarithmic scale is already built in
      - welterde 9y ago
        Assigning an absolute number is much more difficult than assigning numbers on the relative difference between things. Just take the use of dB in acoustics or the magnitude system in astronomy.
        majewsky 9y ago
        Both dB and the magnitude system have nothing to do with difficulty, and everything with practicality. The dB scale is defined in terms of air pressure, which runs on a linear scale.
    - dahart 9y ago
      What does that mean? I wouldn't say we hear in any scale. Log scale is an academic construction, it makes things easy to think about, it's not a physical property of hearing or seeing.
      - welterde 9y ago
        The linear scale however is a physical property of the world (photons per seconds for example) and if we change the intensity in a linear way we notice that the perceived change is not linear, but logarithmic. Hence volume or brightness controls typically aren't linear but logarithmic - people want it to change linearly instead of not at all at the one end and a lot at the other end. The root of the magnitude system in astronomy can be found in the logarithmic nature of the eye as a sensor as well.
        dahart 9y ago
        Yes, good point. Perception of some things has logarithmic response. Within in certain ranges, of course. It's funny because I first imagined the seeing/hearing comment as pitch & color, rather than volume & brightness. Pitch certainly feels somehow naturally logarithmic. But we can hear linear differences as easily as we can hear logarithmic differences. Within certain ranges, of course.
        majewsky 9y ago
        > Within certain ranges, of course. Citation needed. I've never heard of human senses being anything else than logarithmic.
        dahart 9y ago
        Sure, here you go. I said "within certain ranges" because there are absolute limits on either end. I hope it's obvious to you that the logarithmic approximation is only logarithmic until it isn't. The human visual response to staring at the midnight sky and staring at the noon sun are both non-logarithmic relative to the well lit everyday objects you usually look at. The valid range does not extend infinitely in either direction, and at the ends response ceases to be logarithmic even if the middle of the range works out well. So, I think no citations are needed to explain basic absolute limits and the simple fact that logarithmic perception is only valid "within certain ranges." But, since you asked for citations, here are some starting points for understanding lightness perception, and how it's not quite logarithmic even in the middle of the valid range. http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_intensity_response.htm http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_intensity_response.htm "All this only scratches the surface of the complexities of eye response to light intensity, but should illustrate well that the common notion of it being described as simply logarithmic is oversimplification, to say the least." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightness "At first glance, you might approximate the lightness function by a cube root, an approximation that is found in much of the technical literature. However, the linear segment near black is significant, and so the 116 and 16 coefficients. The best-fit pure power function has an exponent of about 0.42, far from 1/3." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#Visi... "The eye senses brightness approximately logarithmically over a moderate range (but more like a power law over a wider range)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold "For white light, the absolute sensitivity found was 5.9 x 10−14 watts / steradian-cm2" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(luminance)#cite_note-lance-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(luminance... "100 Mcd/m2 Possible retinal damage[1]" https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot-org/Sample-Chapter.pdf https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot... see page 276, Fig. 16.2 "Approximate ranges of of vision regimes" http://retina.anatomy.upenn.edu/~rob/lance/units_photometric.html http://retina.anatomy.upenn.edu/~rob/lance/units_photometric... See "Light levels important to vision"
    - deleted 9y ago
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  - undersuit 9y ago
    I guess we don't count in log scale. The billions of people on the world will never get millions, only thousands, hundreds, and tens. Give a person a meter and they'll take a kilometer. Ehh?
  - kemerover 9y ago
    Log scales actually are intuitive to humans. As thinking about things relative to each other is much simplier when they are not easily quantized.
- wolf550e 9y ago
  Many people cannot visualize log scale.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    Well that's what visualization are for. Wealth might be more "multiplicative" than "additive", hence a log scale would be more suitable to study it
- deleted 9y ago
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- dahart 9y ago
  If your goal is to be able to plot incomes of a wide variety of people and be able to visually see the difference between poor and average as well as you can see the difference between average and super-rich, then a log scale is the way to do it. The goal of the comment you replied to, however, is to demonstrate the vastness that orders of magnitude have. It's to compare average people to super-rich, and get a stronger intuitive sense of how much wealthier a billionaire is than the average person, and how much wealthier Bezos is than the average billionaire. Using a log scale doesn't help that goal at all, a log scale actively compresses the range and prevents intuitive physical comparisons & analogies.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    But a log scale is interesting because when you switch of scale, you change the meaning of money. 1) First stages of the visualization would show people from country where the money measure doesn't mean anything at all 2) Then powers of ten later it show how disparately "rich" people are in countries where this measure has a little more significance 3) Powers of tens later you see big companies and rich billionnaires like in this article == Money Is Power (Jeff Bezos is not going to buy one billion baguette de pain tomorrow I can assure you that) 4) Then of course you see higher in the scale huge aggregate of macro economics stuff which no one really have control over or understands
    - dahart 9y ago
      Log scales are interesting for lots of reasons, and they are incredibly useful. Everyone here knows that, and nobody disagrees. But you asked why not think about log scale in response to someone who was attempting to demonstrate absolute differences. Log scales are for showing ratios, they are not for showing absolute differences. The point here isn't to say that Bezos will buy a billion baguettes, but it is show to show that he could buy 90 billion baguettes and feed every single person on the planet several times over. There are only a few people who could do this. And, of course, they won't. EDIT: I meant simply that 90B baguettes would go as far as they go, and 90B baguettes is several times more than 7B people. I was only demonstrating magnitudes in the context of a thread about magnitudes. I am not suggesting that either baguettes or Bezos are a permanent and global solution to world hunger & politics, but either way I can't afford to buy very many people baguettes.
chubot 9y ago
The way I thought about it is that Bill Gates : Donald Trump :: Donald Trump : a wealthy-ish Silicon Valley employee. (This was after a NYTimes article on Trump's true wealth, which was several years before he ran for president.) Say you have $1M. Then Donald Trump might have 200 times more than you, or $200 M (they were saying he's not really a billionaire). But Bill Gates has 200 times more than him -- $40 B. (And apparently now Bill Gates has $90 B). And I guess you could extend it further say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings, which is 200x less than the Silicon Valley employee. So people think that there are three classes: poor, middle, class, rich (Donald Trump). But there is actually another full class above him: the super-rich like Bill Gates.
- kbenson 9y ago
  > say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings Doubtful. Even if you assume a minimum wage of $10, which is well above the Federal minimum (but slightly below some state minimums), that's 500 hours of wages. That's almost three months of 40 hours work weeks where you put every penny into savings. Before taxes. Before living expenses. The vast majority of Americans have far less than $5k in their savings account.[1] 1: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-age-have-in-their-savings-accounts.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-a...
  - aoeusnth1 9y ago
    Measuring the size of savings accounts != measuring the size of savings. Brokerage accounts exist. 401k plans exist. Hell, even paying into a mortgage is a form of savings.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      Sure... but are you just making a distinction, or are you arguing that the average young person working in retail has any of those things? I agree with the distinction, I'm just not sure it makes any difference in this case.
  - 9y ago
etep 9y ago
If Bezos gave all his money to everyone in the world we would all get maybe $13 or so. If all the billionaires did the same we would all get $1000 or so.
- csomar 9y ago
  So you are saying the richest still have potential? I mean we can expect the average person around the world to be able to "yield" $500 for the richest person in this global era. That's like trillions for the worlds richest.
  - yourapostasy 9y ago
    I don't speak for your comment's parent, but anytime I see these types of figures, it brings to mind Iain Banks' comment "Money is a sign of poverty" [1]. You'll see rants [2] against this sentiment, but I have yet to find a rant that doesn't essentially deify money. It's just a tool, and if it doesn't help us sufficiently move the needle towards greater human satisfaction (which I believe is very congruent with moving us towards post-scarcity factors), then it is upon us to find another, better tool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Economy [2] http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/money-is-not-a-sign-of-poverty.html http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/money-is-not-a-sign-of...
    - alk123 9y ago
      Ah, the grand benefit of value - no matter what you call it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
- LesZedCB 9y ago
  I don't want their money. i want their companies. Democratize their companies. control them by employment or by employee or government committee if they are too big. Make the big corporations work for the benefit of everyone, rather than shareholders and owners.
faceplanted 9y ago
I would just go for using height like you mentioned, if you, an average person is 6ft tall, someone with a better job than you would be up to a foot taller than you, a millionaire would be tall building sized and a billionaire would stretch into space. I guessed all of these values, I might do the actual math at some point, but not right now.
- notfromhere 9y ago
  I did the rough math. If average net worth in the US is 80k, and bezos is worth $90 billion, then compared to an average 6 foot tall person, Bezos would be ~1300 miles tall; in space altitude from earth, that would be geospatial orbit
  - alexeldeib 9y ago
    I'm not sure if i'm more amused by the fact that he's in space or that he's still only in orbit.
loader 9y ago
Or to use your height comparison the richest billionaires would be over 6,000,000 feet tall.
slowmovintarget 9y ago
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/980/ https://xkcd.com/980/
- ttoinou 9y ago
  Thank you for the link ! That's what I was talking with log scale. THIS is a log scale visualisation about money
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - dahart 9y ago
    Each panel is a financial cartogram that compares things within the panel to each other by showing the amount of money as an area. That's exactly what the top comment was doing -- making an analogy to a physical unit to make the comparison more visceral and intuitive. You may notice that comparing things across panels is more difficult than the effortless comparison of two categories within a single panel. It's easy to understand conceptually when you study this map that the insurance industry in the US is a lot more money than Kate Middleton's wedding dress. But you don't see visually and immediately how much more money, because they're not side-by-side in the same units. On a log scale, plotting everyone's income puts Bezos and Gates side by side with very little visible difference, while the difference between someone who makes 20k a year and someone who makes 10k a year has a larger log difference. That emphasizes the ratio of difference, rather than the absolute difference. The log scale completely hides the fact that you could pay 75,000 people 20k a year with only the amount extra that Bezos has over Gates.
    - ttoinou 9y ago
      You can also give decent salaries to a lot of African people with the 10k difference between the 20K/year person and the 10K/year person... so what's your point :) ?
      - dahart 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
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aphextron 9y ago
>The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds). I really wish this point was better understood. The rhetoric around the "1%" has completely missed the point, as the vast majority of the 1% is comprised of our doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people. Pitting the poor and working classes against them makes no sense. The real problem is the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth [0]. http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equality/ http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equal... [0]
- jon_richards 9y ago
  The "1%" is weird because it simultaneously includes a lot that people didn't want it to and doesn't include a lot that people think it does. The 1% is roughly half a million in yearly income or ten million in net assets (remember to subtract your mortgage from that!). It is true that this goes beyond the ultra wealthy to largely include "doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people", but that doesn't mean most doctors, etc. are in the 1%. There's an urban legend that 19% of people think they are in the 1%, but the actual poll was that 19% of people think they would be affected by tax cuts affecting the 1%. I'd like to see a study of what percentage of people think they are in the 1% or soon will be, because I bet it's a lot more than 1%. So you have a term that was meant to vilify the ultra-rich, but makes the average doctor, etc. worry about being vilified.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > I'd like to see a study of what percentage of people think they are in the 1% or soon will be, because I bet it's a lot more than 1%. How many people live in the Valley?
- voidmain 9y ago
  > the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth This is nonsense. Your source compares the wealth of the richest few people to the net worth of the "poorest" 50% of people. Net worth takes into account debt, and it happens that the half of the population with the lowest net worth has a total amount of debt about equal to its total amount of assets, so its total net worth is almost zero. A little more credit card spending, and an eight year old with a nickel in his pocket will have "more wealth than the poorest half". Needless to say this is not anything like half of the world's wealth. The total wealth of individuals is (according to my quick Google search) something like $250 trillion, and that presumably doesn't take into account wealth held by governments. It's also silly to use net worth to identify the "poorest". Supposedly Donald Trump had a net worth in 1990 of negative 900 million. Your source's calculation would presumably call him the "poorest" person in the world and his presence would subtract $900 million from the wealth of the "poorest half". Is that sensible? The richest people are very, very rich compared to most individuals. But no individual has much compared to the wealth of the whole world, and I suspect the share is shrinking. In the 19th century JP Morgan bailed out the US government, rather than the other way around! A more interesting analysis would be to look at the distribution of total lifetime consumption.
racl101 9y ago
I'd either need to start sitting down or be Quicksilver to beat the timer before it gets to my net worth. Great analogy btw. I might have to borrow it to explain it to other people.
rubicon33 9y ago
It boggles my mind that this can happen. I'm as pro-capitalist, pro-democracy, pro-make-a-fuck-ton-of-money as you can get... But even I am blown away by the wealth of some of the top billionaires. Just think about the good that some of that could do for the country. Put it into science. Put it into social welfare systems. I don't care, put it into something! I don't know what the solution is. The naive comment would be if you make above X billion everything else goes to some re-distribution fund... Obviously that will turn a lot of people off. But the point is, I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth.
- specialist 9y ago
  Capitalism != corporatism. Capitalism: pro competition, pro markets. Corporatism: anti-competition, Freedom Markets™. Conflating the two is the biggest failing of modern leftists, such as myself. We can hardly criticize, mitigate our modern winner-takes-all economy until we stop defending it.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    The way Bill gates and Jeff Bezos made money look closer to free markets principles than the way others top 500 great fortunes made it, no ?
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - specialist 9y ago
      I don't follow. Please explain.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  It doesn't boggles my mind at all, and I prefer Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates rather than more corrupted people. "All the good you can do with this tons of money" Money at that scale is power. Bezos could give away a little each year to a science institut for example, but it would not work for short term stuff. You are not going to discover 1000x more stuff tomorrow by pouring billions in science. But for a long term goal yes Jeff Bezos could nudge more people getting into science if he wanted that. And that's what he might do for Space exploration / technologies (at least that's what he publicly says) and that is called... Investment. So which investment is the best ? Who knows ? Who has the power to decide it ? PS : not spending its own money is NOT throwing it away, it increase power purchase of all others people that uses the same money. Spending it increases money circulation and can cause inflation for example. PS2 : "I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth" who said anyone was given money because he "needed" it ? We don't live in a communism utopia
blktiger 9y ago
One thing to keep in mind as well is that the net worth numbers are using stock value which most of the ultra rich cannot actually liquidate.
- LesZedCB 9y ago
  either: all at once, or some very quickly. They can though. wanna buy a car for 150k, sell off some shares, buy a car. right? Honestly, though, even the interest on whatever liquid assets they do have probably yields more than my current savings total.
saosebastiao 9y ago
I like to think about it like this: With a wealth of 92.3B, even earning a moderate 8% net return on that wealth, Jeff Bezos needs to spend $20.2M per day just to not get any richer. Now I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about how awesome it would be to be rich. One day I added up what it would take to have the most obscene, ridiculously opulent lifestyle imaginable...private jets, presidential suites, chauffers, megayachts, basically anything and everything imaginable that I would possibly want if money were no object. I never surpassed a requirement for more than $20M per year. $20M per day is ludicrous...and that's just what it would take for him to not get any richer.
- mikeash 9y ago
  You clearly lack imagination. Monthly trips around the Moon would easily surpass that even without any yachts.
  - saosebastiao 9y ago
    Yeah, I only included things that I'd actually want. If I didn't want something (like a trip around the moon, or a patek philippe watch), it wasn't included. Maybe I'm pretty low maintenance, but everything I added up seemed unmaintainably ridiculous to me.
- retube 9y ago
  8% a moderate return?
  - saosebastiao 9y ago
    Net of taxes, and given the availability of hedge funds for someone of his wealth, 8% is probably on the low end.
    - retube 9y ago
      Ha ha sure
    - 9y ago
brandonmenc 9y ago
> I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. And yet, there was a time when the richest were significantly richer than they are now. Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller was worth at least four times as much as Bezos is.
- maerF0x0 9y ago
  could you source that claim please?
  - lodi 9y ago
    First result for "rockefeller net worth": https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the-rockefellers-the-legacy-of-historys-richest-man/#727cdd703c26 https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the-roc... ($340B in 2017 USD)
    - kens 9y ago
      That source says that Rockefeller's net worth was $30 billion in current (2014) dollars. The $340 billion figure is from a semi-nonsensical calculation that is popular because it yields eye-popping large numbers. They figured Rockefeller's assets equaled 1.5% of the US GDP at the time. And 1.5% of the current GDP would be about $340 billion dollars. But assets as a fraction of GDP is not very meaningful. It's like saying if I moved to a country with a small GDP such as Samoa I'd be richer than Bill Gates. In effect, the $340B Rockefeller number is big because the US economy has grown. The worst part is many websites often confuse the scaled-GDP numbers with constant-dollar numbers, resulting in much confusion.
  - brandonmenc 9y ago
    Forbes and Fortune, both of which are cited by Wikipedia. A commenter further down questions their methodology. Honest question - can anyone refute the claim that it is currently not the point in time when the largest share of wealth is in the smallest number of hands?
magic_beans 9y ago
That's a really incredible analogy. Thank you.
tomascot 9y ago
Quite the movie plot you got there. Except that people dies and they try to steal money to avoid death, and also changing the time scale
benevol 9y ago
The reason for this level of inequality is this: Our culture tells us that our motivation to do better (or more) work should be the power to dominate others (being rich is just that). And that's just what humanity will have to change in the coming years: Change our culture to replace the incentive of domination with humane incentives and values.
mcappleton 9y ago
I thought no the easiest way to understand is this: You could spend 1 million dollars a day for 270 years before you ran out.

by kens 9y ago

ttoinou 9y ago

Why not rather think about wealth on a log scale ?

sushisource 9y ago
Log scales aren't intuitive to humans. I think it's a great example because that's sort of what it tricks you into doing.
- welterde 9y ago
  One would think it would be since we hear and see in log scale.
  - zild3d 9y ago
    Yes we hear in log scale, but why would that be intuitive? Ask someone how loud or soft any sound is - a dog bark, a cymbal crash, a whisper - and you won't get a numeric response. We're used to measuring distances, weights, etc but not volume, aside from the volume knob which goes from 0-100%, and the logarithmic scale is already built in
    - welterde 9y ago
      Assigning an absolute number is much more difficult than assigning numbers on the relative difference between things. Just take the use of dB in acoustics or the magnitude system in astronomy.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        Both dB and the magnitude system have nothing to do with difficulty, and everything with practicality. The dB scale is defined in terms of air pressure, which runs on a linear scale.
  - dahart 9y ago
    What does that mean? I wouldn't say we hear in any scale. Log scale is an academic construction, it makes things easy to think about, it's not a physical property of hearing or seeing.
    - welterde 9y ago
      The linear scale however is a physical property of the world (photons per seconds for example) and if we change the intensity in a linear way we notice that the perceived change is not linear, but logarithmic. Hence volume or brightness controls typically aren't linear but logarithmic - people want it to change linearly instead of not at all at the one end and a lot at the other end. The root of the magnitude system in astronomy can be found in the logarithmic nature of the eye as a sensor as well.
      - dahart 9y ago
        Yes, good point. Perception of some things has logarithmic response. Within in certain ranges, of course. It's funny because I first imagined the seeing/hearing comment as pitch & color, rather than volume & brightness. Pitch certainly feels somehow naturally logarithmic. But we can hear linear differences as easily as we can hear logarithmic differences. Within certain ranges, of course.
        majewsky 9y ago
        > Within certain ranges, of course. Citation needed. I've never heard of human senses being anything else than logarithmic.
        dahart 9y ago
        Sure, here you go. I said "within certain ranges" because there are absolute limits on either end. I hope it's obvious to you that the logarithmic approximation is only logarithmic until it isn't. The human visual response to staring at the midnight sky and staring at the noon sun are both non-logarithmic relative to the well lit everyday objects you usually look at. The valid range does not extend infinitely in either direction, and at the ends response ceases to be logarithmic even if the middle of the range works out well. So, I think no citations are needed to explain basic absolute limits and the simple fact that logarithmic perception is only valid "within certain ranges." But, since you asked for citations, here are some starting points for understanding lightness perception, and how it's not quite logarithmic even in the middle of the valid range. http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_intensity_response.htm http://www.telescope-optics.net/eye_intensity_response.htm "All this only scratches the surface of the complexities of eye response to light intensity, but should illustrate well that the common notion of it being described as simply logarithmic is oversimplification, to say the least." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightness "At first glance, you might approximate the lightness function by a cube root, an approximation that is found in much of the technical literature. However, the linear segment near black is significant, and so the 116 and 16 coefficients. The best-fit pure power function has an exponent of about 0.42, far from 1/3." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#Visi... "The eye senses brightness approximately logarithmically over a moderate range (but more like a power law over a wider range)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_threshold "For white light, the absolute sensitivity found was 5.9 x 10−14 watts / steradian-cm2" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(luminance)#cite_note-lance-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(luminance... "100 Mcd/m2 Possible retinal damage[1]" https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot-org/Sample-Chapter.pdf https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot... see page 276, Fig. 16.2 "Approximate ranges of of vision regimes" http://retina.anatomy.upenn.edu/~rob/lance/units_photometric.html http://retina.anatomy.upenn.edu/~rob/lance/units_photometric... See "Light levels important to vision"
  - deleted 9y ago
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- undersuit 9y ago
  I guess we don't count in log scale. The billions of people on the world will never get millions, only thousands, hundreds, and tens. Give a person a meter and they'll take a kilometer. Ehh?
- kemerover 9y ago
  Log scales actually are intuitive to humans. As thinking about things relative to each other is much simplier when they are not easily quantized.
wolf550e 9y ago
Many people cannot visualize log scale.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  Well that's what visualization are for. Wealth might be more "multiplicative" than "additive", hence a log scale would be more suitable to study it
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dahart 9y ago
If your goal is to be able to plot incomes of a wide variety of people and be able to visually see the difference between poor and average as well as you can see the difference between average and super-rich, then a log scale is the way to do it. The goal of the comment you replied to, however, is to demonstrate the vastness that orders of magnitude have. It's to compare average people to super-rich, and get a stronger intuitive sense of how much wealthier a billionaire is than the average person, and how much wealthier Bezos is than the average billionaire. Using a log scale doesn't help that goal at all, a log scale actively compresses the range and prevents intuitive physical comparisons & analogies.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  But a log scale is interesting because when you switch of scale, you change the meaning of money. 1) First stages of the visualization would show people from country where the money measure doesn't mean anything at all 2) Then powers of ten later it show how disparately "rich" people are in countries where this measure has a little more significance 3) Powers of tens later you see big companies and rich billionnaires like in this article == Money Is Power (Jeff Bezos is not going to buy one billion baguette de pain tomorrow I can assure you that) 4) Then of course you see higher in the scale huge aggregate of macro economics stuff which no one really have control over or understands
  - dahart 9y ago
    Log scales are interesting for lots of reasons, and they are incredibly useful. Everyone here knows that, and nobody disagrees. But you asked why not think about log scale in response to someone who was attempting to demonstrate absolute differences. Log scales are for showing ratios, they are not for showing absolute differences. The point here isn't to say that Bezos will buy a billion baguettes, but it is show to show that he could buy 90 billion baguettes and feed every single person on the planet several times over. There are only a few people who could do this. And, of course, they won't. EDIT: I meant simply that 90B baguettes would go as far as they go, and 90B baguettes is several times more than 7B people. I was only demonstrating magnitudes in the context of a thread about magnitudes. I am not suggesting that either baguettes or Bezos are a permanent and global solution to world hunger & politics, but either way I can't afford to buy very many people baguettes.

chubot 9y ago

The way I thought about it is that Bill Gates : Donald Trump :: Donald Trump : a wealthy-ish Silicon Valley employee. (This was after a NYTimes article on Trump's true wealth, which was several years before he ran for president.) Say you have $1M. Then Donald Trump might have 200 times more than you, or $200 M (they were saying he's not really a billionaire). But Bill Gates has 200 times more than him -- $40 B. (And apparently now Bill Gates has $90 B). And I guess you could extend it further say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings, which is 200x less than the Silicon Valley employee. So people think that there are three classes: poor, middle, class, rich (Donald Trump). But there is actually another full class above him: the super-rich like Bill Gates.

kbenson 9y ago
> say that an average young person working in retail might have $5K in savings Doubtful. Even if you assume a minimum wage of $10, which is well above the Federal minimum (but slightly below some state minimums), that's 500 hours of wages. That's almost three months of 40 hours work weeks where you put every penny into savings. Before taxes. Before living expenses. The vast majority of Americans have far less than $5k in their savings account.[1] 1: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-age-have-in-their-savings-accounts.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/03/how-much-americans-at-every-a...
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  Measuring the size of savings accounts != measuring the size of savings. Brokerage accounts exist. 401k plans exist. Hell, even paying into a mortgage is a form of savings.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Sure... but are you just making a distinction, or are you arguing that the average young person working in retail has any of those things? I agree with the distinction, I'm just not sure it makes any difference in this case.
- 9y ago

etep 9y ago

If Bezos gave all his money to everyone in the world we would all get maybe $13 or so. If all the billionaires did the same we would all get $1000 or so.

csomar 9y ago
So you are saying the richest still have potential? I mean we can expect the average person around the world to be able to "yield" $500 for the richest person in this global era. That's like trillions for the worlds richest.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  I don't speak for your comment's parent, but anytime I see these types of figures, it brings to mind Iain Banks' comment "Money is a sign of poverty" [1]. You'll see rants [2] against this sentiment, but I have yet to find a rant that doesn't essentially deify money. It's just a tool, and if it doesn't help us sufficiently move the needle towards greater human satisfaction (which I believe is very congruent with moving us towards post-scarcity factors), then it is upon us to find another, better tool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Economy [2] http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/money-is-not-a-sign-of-poverty.html http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/money-is-not-a-sign-of...
  - alk123 9y ago
    Ah, the grand benefit of value - no matter what you call it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
LesZedCB 9y ago
I don't want their money. i want their companies. Democratize their companies. control them by employment or by employee or government committee if they are too big. Make the big corporations work for the benefit of everyone, rather than shareholders and owners.

faceplanted 9y ago

I would just go for using height like you mentioned, if you, an average person is 6ft tall, someone with a better job than you would be up to a foot taller than you, a millionaire would be tall building sized and a billionaire would stretch into space. I guessed all of these values, I might do the actual math at some point, but not right now.

notfromhere 9y ago
I did the rough math. If average net worth in the US is 80k, and bezos is worth $90 billion, then compared to an average 6 foot tall person, Bezos would be ~1300 miles tall; in space altitude from earth, that would be geospatial orbit
- alexeldeib 9y ago
  I'm not sure if i'm more amused by the fact that he's in space or that he's still only in orbit.

loader 9y ago

Or to use your height comparison the richest billionaires would be over 6,000,000 feet tall.

slowmovintarget 9y ago

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/980/ https://xkcd.com/980/

ttoinou 9y ago
Thank you for the link ! That's what I was talking with log scale. THIS is a log scale visualisation about money
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dahart 9y ago
  Each panel is a financial cartogram that compares things within the panel to each other by showing the amount of money as an area. That's exactly what the top comment was doing -- making an analogy to a physical unit to make the comparison more visceral and intuitive. You may notice that comparing things across panels is more difficult than the effortless comparison of two categories within a single panel. It's easy to understand conceptually when you study this map that the insurance industry in the US is a lot more money than Kate Middleton's wedding dress. But you don't see visually and immediately how much more money, because they're not side-by-side in the same units. On a log scale, plotting everyone's income puts Bezos and Gates side by side with very little visible difference, while the difference between someone who makes 20k a year and someone who makes 10k a year has a larger log difference. That emphasizes the ratio of difference, rather than the absolute difference. The log scale completely hides the fact that you could pay 75,000 people 20k a year with only the amount extra that Bezos has over Gates.
  - ttoinou 9y ago
    You can also give decent salaries to a lot of African people with the 10k difference between the 20K/year person and the 10K/year person... so what's your point :) ?
    - dahart 9y ago

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aphextron 9y ago

>The 1% hardly even registers on this scale (a few seconds). I really wish this point was better understood. The rhetoric around the "1%" has completely missed the point, as the vast majority of the 1% is comprised of our doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people. Pitting the poor and working classes against them makes no sense. The real problem is the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth [0]. http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equality/ http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equal... [0]

jon_richards 9y ago
The "1%" is weird because it simultaneously includes a lot that people didn't want it to and doesn't include a lot that people think it does. The 1% is roughly half a million in yearly income or ten million in net assets (remember to subtract your mortgage from that!). It is true that this goes beyond the ultra wealthy to largely include "doctors, lawyers, small business owners, and other normal successful people", but that doesn't mean most doctors, etc. are in the 1%. There's an urban legend that 19% of people think they are in the 1%, but the actual poll was that 19% of people think they would be affected by tax cuts affecting the 1%. I'd like to see a study of what percentage of people think they are in the 1% or soon will be, because I bet it's a lot more than 1%. So you have a term that was meant to vilify the ultra-rich, but makes the average doctor, etc. worry about being vilified.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > I'd like to see a study of what percentage of people think they are in the 1% or soon will be, because I bet it's a lot more than 1%. How many people live in the Valley?
voidmain 9y ago
> the 0.00000001% of people who control now half the world's wealth This is nonsense. Your source compares the wealth of the richest few people to the net worth of the "poorest" 50% of people. Net worth takes into account debt, and it happens that the half of the population with the lowest net worth has a total amount of debt about equal to its total amount of assets, so its total net worth is almost zero. A little more credit card spending, and an eight year old with a nickel in his pocket will have "more wealth than the poorest half". Needless to say this is not anything like half of the world's wealth. The total wealth of individuals is (according to my quick Google search) something like $250 trillion, and that presumably doesn't take into account wealth held by governments. It's also silly to use net worth to identify the "poorest". Supposedly Donald Trump had a net worth in 1990 of negative 900 million. Your source's calculation would presumably call him the "poorest" person in the world and his presence would subtract $900 million from the wealth of the "poorest half". Is that sensible? The richest people are very, very rich compared to most individuals. But no individual has much compared to the wealth of the whole world, and I suspect the share is shrinking. In the 19th century JP Morgan bailed out the US government, rather than the other way around! A more interesting analysis would be to look at the distribution of total lifetime consumption.

racl101 9y ago

I'd either need to start sitting down or be Quicksilver to beat the timer before it gets to my net worth. Great analogy btw. I might have to borrow it to explain it to other people.

rubicon33 9y ago

It boggles my mind that this can happen. I'm as pro-capitalist, pro-democracy, pro-make-a-fuck-ton-of-money as you can get... But even I am blown away by the wealth of some of the top billionaires. Just think about the good that some of that could do for the country. Put it into science. Put it into social welfare systems. I don't care, put it into something! I don't know what the solution is. The naive comment would be if you make above X billion everything else goes to some re-distribution fund... Obviously that will turn a lot of people off. But the point is, I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth.

specialist 9y ago
Capitalism != corporatism. Capitalism: pro competition, pro markets. Corporatism: anti-competition, Freedom Markets™. Conflating the two is the biggest failing of modern leftists, such as myself. We can hardly criticize, mitigate our modern winner-takes-all economy until we stop defending it.
- ttoinou 9y ago
  The way Bill gates and Jeff Bezos made money look closer to free markets principles than the way others top 500 great fortunes made it, no ?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - specialist 9y ago
    I don't follow. Please explain.
ttoinou 9y ago
It doesn't boggles my mind at all, and I prefer Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates rather than more corrupted people. "All the good you can do with this tons of money" Money at that scale is power. Bezos could give away a little each year to a science institut for example, but it would not work for short term stuff. You are not going to discover 1000x more stuff tomorrow by pouring billions in science. But for a long term goal yes Jeff Bezos could nudge more people getting into science if he wanted that. And that's what he might do for Space exploration / technologies (at least that's what he publicly says) and that is called... Investment. So which investment is the best ? Who knows ? Who has the power to decide it ? PS : not spending its own money is NOT throwing it away, it increase power purchase of all others people that uses the same money. Spending it increases money circulation and can cause inflation for example. PS2 : "I just don't think anybody needs that kind of wealth" who said anyone was given money because he "needed" it ? We don't live in a communism utopia

blktiger 9y ago

One thing to keep in mind as well is that the net worth numbers are using stock value which most of the ultra rich cannot actually liquidate.

LesZedCB 9y ago
either: all at once, or some very quickly. They can though. wanna buy a car for 150k, sell off some shares, buy a car. right? Honestly, though, even the interest on whatever liquid assets they do have probably yields more than my current savings total.

saosebastiao 9y ago

I like to think about it like this: With a wealth of 92.3B, even earning a moderate 8% net return on that wealth, Jeff Bezos needs to spend $20.2M per day just to not get any richer. Now I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about how awesome it would be to be rich. One day I added up what it would take to have the most obscene, ridiculously opulent lifestyle imaginable...private jets, presidential suites, chauffers, megayachts, basically anything and everything imaginable that I would possibly want if money were no object. I never surpassed a requirement for more than $20M per year. $20M per day is ludicrous...and that's just what it would take for him to not get any richer.

mikeash 9y ago
You clearly lack imagination. Monthly trips around the Moon would easily surpass that even without any yachts.
- saosebastiao 9y ago
  Yeah, I only included things that I'd actually want. If I didn't want something (like a trip around the moon, or a patek philippe watch), it wasn't included. Maybe I'm pretty low maintenance, but everything I added up seemed unmaintainably ridiculous to me.
retube 9y ago
8% a moderate return?
- saosebastiao 9y ago
  Net of taxes, and given the availability of hedge funds for someone of his wealth, 8% is probably on the low end.
  - retube 9y ago
    Ha ha sure
  - 9y ago

brandonmenc 9y ago

> I think most people don't realize just how much money the richest people have. And yet, there was a time when the richest were significantly richer than they are now. Adjusted for inflation, Rockefeller was worth at least four times as much as Bezos is.

maerF0x0 9y ago
could you source that claim please?
- lodi 9y ago
  First result for "rockefeller net worth": https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the-rockefellers-the-legacy-of-historys-richest-man/#727cdd703c26 https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlodonnell/2014/07/11/the-roc... ($340B in 2017 USD)
  - kens 9y ago
    That source says that Rockefeller's net worth was $30 billion in current (2014) dollars. The $340 billion figure is from a semi-nonsensical calculation that is popular because it yields eye-popping large numbers. They figured Rockefeller's assets equaled 1.5% of the US GDP at the time. And 1.5% of the current GDP would be about $340 billion dollars. But assets as a fraction of GDP is not very meaningful. It's like saying if I moved to a country with a small GDP such as Samoa I'd be richer than Bill Gates. In effect, the $340B Rockefeller number is big because the US economy has grown. The worst part is many websites often confuse the scaled-GDP numbers with constant-dollar numbers, resulting in much confusion.
- brandonmenc 9y ago
  Forbes and Fortune, both of which are cited by Wikipedia. A commenter further down questions their methodology. Honest question - can anyone refute the claim that it is currently not the point in time when the largest share of wealth is in the smallest number of hands?

magic_beans 9y ago

That's a really incredible analogy. Thank you.

tomascot 9y ago

Quite the movie plot you got there. Except that people dies and they try to steal money to avoid death, and also changing the time scale

benevol 9y ago

The reason for this level of inequality is this: Our culture tells us that our motivation to do better (or more) work should be the power to dominate others (being rich is just that). And that's just what humanity will have to change in the coming years: Change our culture to replace the incentive of domination with humane incentives and values.

mcappleton 9y ago

I thought no the easiest way to understand is this: You could spend 1 million dollars a day for 270 years before you ran out.