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The Billionaires Won’t Save Us
Accumulation of wealth is just another toxic feedback loop
If you are waiting for Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to suddenly see their hearts swell to three times their normal size, you’re going to be waiting a long time. It’s repeatedly tossed around that one of these individuals, currently Musk, has the power to end world hunger by simply sharing a small percentage of their wealth. The math on this is completely make-believe. Musk knows it. That’s why he called the bluff of the pundits, and said that if someone can prove the spending of those funds would actually eradicate world hunger, by showing the math, he would donate the money.
The problem is numbers get too large to logically hold in the mind, and the brain has a tendency to simplify the math for us by thinking in more easily computed terms of “millions” or “billions.” It is certainly easier to think of large numbers without all those zeroes trailing behind them. And it gets easy to confuse how exactly those sums divide among people. You might think, oh, if you have 300 million people, and 300 million dollars, each person gets a million dollars! That’s not how math works.
When you think of this much wealth accumulated by one individual, and try to mete out how long it would take that one person to spend such wealth, yes it becomes outlandish. But to…
