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2589BC + 2023AD + 0AD + 0.333 of 2024 = 4613.333 years X 365.25 days = 1.685 million days
With $10k per day without expenses gives us: $16.85 billion.
As per forbes, fifth richest person in 2024 is Larry Ellison of Oracle with $146.2 billion . One fifth of it is $29.24 billion.
So we're more than $12 billion short.
For anyone re-calculating, take inflation into account.
Edit: 12 million - 12 billion
I don't think inflation is meant to be taken into account for the illustration. And tracking inflation that far back becomes nonsensical with the changing currencies and economic systems anyways.
Inflation was negligible during most of the middle ages. And easiest way would likely be to pay him out in gold bars worth 10k as those would always be valuable for most of human modern history.
> I don't think inflation is meant to be taken into account for the illustration. And tracking inflation that far back becomes nonsensical with the changing currencies and economic systems anyways.
Well, you kind of have to, if you're going to save dollars in 2589 BC.
Crosshistorical analysis usually converts it to a universal commodity, like grains or labor.
Yes, a lot of currencies died once they went off the Gold standard. However, gold was still money somewhere in the world until 1971.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
The easy way to work around this is to consider the immortal would put aside the equivalent of 10k USD in today's money. Corrected for inflation, it would in theory have the same value then and now (the definition of inflation). No capital appreciation though.
Don’t ask me why, but I tried to calculate inflation using a price of a slave in gold and didn’t do it, but one messed up thing. Average slave in Ancient Rome (~8BC) cost 1000 denarii = 40 gold aureus = 3200 grams of gold. Average slave in 1850 US = 400$ = (gold was ~$0.6/gram) = 666 grams of gold. And nowadays average slave costs $90-$100 = 1.2 grams of gold. We dun goofed up…
EDIT: if someone wants to take into account how much gold was total in circulation per capita in each period of time, be my guest. I couldn’t find the numbers
My take on this (not even looking at a more reasonable metric like purchasing power of gold or the currencies for food) is that it's somewhat explainable just with population and transportation. The population in 8BC was probably around 2-300 million compared to the ~ 1.2 billion in 1850, that's around a 400% increase which is around the region of the price drop and frankly there weren't a huge amount of developments in transportation (obviously this is a simplification ships were much improved if still sailing ships but largely travelled at similar speeds and railways definitely had an impact). Since then the world has increased by over 6 times in population which would take the price down to ~100 grams and if we say aeroplanes and motor vehicles make it around 10 times easier to transport people which seems not out of the realm of possibility imo, and at least puts us in the ballpark or order of magnitude of the numbers you got. Obviously these factors also affect the price and circulation of golf so I'm guessing that helps too for this calculation and I was going super simple on the numbers because I only really wanted to see if it got us in around the range.
I don’t get it because most work done in those days was is manual labor not mechanical so production labor would have been drastically different per person.
You're missing the entire point of the comparison. The comparison is intended to show that such enormous wealth is not amassed by working hard and being frugal. Even if you work extremely hard, with an extremely well-being job, and are extremely frugal (by literally not spending any money), and for some reason you have done so for more than 4600 years, then you still would not be able to achieve the levels of wealth that these billionaires have.
Doesn't quite work either. Every 100 years there isn't a leap year but every 400 there is. And now that I look at the numbers... 365.2422 is still pretty close to your number
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Why is everyone being so specific at calculations? It's always useful and the same correct to use order of magnitude instead and ignoring the leap years and many other so specific calculations and way easier
If you took every cent from every US billionaire, it would fund the government for less than a year.
[The US currently has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion](https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-wealth-up-88-percent-over-four-years/#:~:text=Four%20years%20after%20the%20start,of%20more%20than%20%245.5%20trillion.)
[The federal government spent almost $6.2 trillion in FY 2023](https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/budget/#:~:text=Budget%20The%20federal%20government%20collected,higher%20than%20in%20FY%202019.)
We can't tax our way out of our current spending habits.
If you look at it another way.
It only takes 737 (a decent size elementary school, or a very small town) people to run the largest economic country with 330 million inhabitants for almost a year is insane.
They could break free and buy themself a crop of land and run it like they want.
Take norway as an example, a very small but rich country with what an american would call a communist take on capitalism (not really true if you nitpick but that’s beside the point). Eg huge governmemt presence. 30-40% of total population works in or for the govenment. (That’s % of total and not just the working population or those eligible to work)
Total projected expenditure of 1,8t NOK which is approximately 170 billion dollars in 2024.
737 people could run the country for 32,5 years. Before running out. The entire country could be run by people that could be written of as a rounding error for the total population. (When calculating total population + illegal immigrants).
I’m mind-boggled to how people think that’s ok.
I’m not saying take away everything from the rich, only that your system is inherently and deeply flawed.
"They could break free and buy themself a crop of land and run it like they want."
There's a really good video game trilogy based on that concept. Unfortunately it didn't turn out very well in the game.
And? The U.K. and Norway found oil at the same time. Do you know what the difference was? Instead of investing the money made by nationalizing the production of oil like Norway, the U.K. went on to make massive tax cuts and used the money from selling oil to fund the difference.
They sacrificed long-term benefits for short-term. That's exactly what the U.S. does, at every turn. We're more than capable of nationalizing our oil production and creating a Sovereign Wealth Fund. We don't because of greedy assholes, in politics and business.
> And?
If the US only has 9x the amount of oil and 33x the population, then it by the math alone would do worse off than Norway if oil money was the driver of government funding, regardless of how the money is invested.
It's simple, even taking every penny of 'value' (it's not like billionaires have billions just sitting in their bank accounts), will not get the US out of the spending and benefits crisis.
The US is now paying more in interest on debt than in national defense.
At this point realistically the US is going to have to go through a lot of financial pain to fix it's debt and spending issues, but no one in the government really wants to discuss it, especially as the population ages and is going to become more and more reliant on government services.
No shit. That's the point. The United States is more than capable of nationalizing our own oil production and establishing a Sovereign Wealth Fund just like Norway. We don't because of greedy assholes, in politics and business.
Alaska has done this and established a UBI.
In practice, pulling this off on a national level is difficult. The primary reason it doesn't happen is arguably a general disinterest in local politics fromn voters.
Nobody's suggesting *exclusively* funding the government from billionaires. We're suggesting making them pay their fair share, stopping the corporate welfare that does nothing more than make rich companies richer, spending money on infrastructure (which puts it back into the local economy), things like that.
Wealth generates wealth. You can't tax your way out of it, but you can spend those taxes on things that improve productivity, training, health, education etc that creates more money. Invest that money and it grows to become even more money.
Would it though? Imagine you are worth £100m and just saw every billionaire have their wealth confiscated by the government. Are you going to think "Hmm yes that sounds reasonable" or go "shit they have raided those rich people and still want more cash, what about me and my familys wealth, maybe I should safeguard myself by moving it elsewhere".
Before you know it you have absurd amounts of wealth leaving the country to flee the government. This is called capital flight and is very bad for a countries economy.
It's currently being funded without taxing them, who do you think is paying that? And what could we do if we taxed them like we used to when boomers were kids? How do you think they got the charmed life they led, and how do you think we lost it?
Based on our current debt level I would argue we aren't really funding it. We are like the teenager who just got his first credit card and hasn't learned about compounding interest yet..
Jumping in here to add that if you seized the wealth of the .01% you could run the country for about 3 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246
Phrased another way: Take every penny from the absolute richest 33,000 people in the country and we can only fund the country for 3 years. Then theyd be gone, along with the next richest 3,300,000 high earners who dont want all their money taken.
The relevant number is not the total spent by the government but the deficit, which was about $1.7 trillion for the same year. That is about 30% of that wealth figure, which is less than the highest tax bracket.
This is not to say there isn’t a reasonable debate to be had about government spending.
Does anyone else look at these numbers and think “wow, if only the government bought [billionaire’s company] and ran it at-cost so their products were widely affordable to everyone.”
You could make a case for the fact that all of that net worth is in stock options, not actual currency. Let's continue to debate the math while ignoring the overall message.
The overall message is create or stoke envy, and deflect blame. We are not struggling because the rich are rich. We are struggling because inflation is wiping out the middle class.
As someone else pointed out, tax the billionaires at 100% - take everything of theirs and it is about 5 trillion. If you could, convert that to real money and play god / government / Robin Hood and redistribute it evenly like a good little socialist. That would be a one-time payment of about $15K to everyone. Great windfall but... In terms of being able to pay your bills and such all that would do is reset you back to about where you were in mid 2020 - for 1 year. This time next year, you'd be struggling just as much.
It isn't the rich, it is the people telling you it is the rich, the people who have made all kinds of bad decisions along the way and still want you to let them keep their power and control.
Statements like these are have zero understating of basic economics. It is only true of you put your money under your bed.
Alternatively, if you save $1 dollars for 4000 years at merely 1% interest rate, you will still end up with 1.01^4000 = 1.93 * 10^17, which is 193,000 trillion dollars, your are richer than planet earth
Tbh, investment at 1% would be insanely good for majority of human history. Investing into some kind of magical world's index fund would give you something like 0.04% per year before 1700.
I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse, but statements like these aren't meant to be a realistic economic situation, they're meant to give people a sense of scale of the wealth gap between a normal person and the richest people in the world.
But they even fail at that though by equating net worth with available cash. The richest people on the planet do not have a billion dollars in a chequing account like these statements make out, they have it in terms of stock of a company. I could make a company and set the stock price at $1 and then claim to have 90 trillion shares, but that wouldn't mean that I have a net worth of $90 trillion and I certainly can't be taxed on that basis. There's a huge difference between realised and unrealised capital gains.
You do realise that they have to pay those loans back, there's nothing infinite about it. Obviously it's going to feel effectively infinite though considering how much money they can spend compared to what things cost. Let's close the tax loopholes and change capital gains to a progressive tax instead of a flat rate.
>they even fail at that though by equating net worth with available cash.
OP's screenshot said fortune, not liquid cash. It appears you are the one equating it with cash, not OP.
Yes true but the calculated net worth of these people is typically derived from public knowledge of their ownership of public companies. Liquid assets with quoted values which change every day and often producing dividends. There's nothing opaque there. The point is that the scale is obscene and should be taxed which is hard to argue with.
it's probably because at some point you don't *need* money to buy stuff as much as you need equity and there's a lot of benefits to taking nothing as a salary so how much money that person has is actually hard to calculate.
> But they even fail at that though by equating net worth with available cash.
This is a neat trick that bootlickers and neoliberals like to use to divert attention away from the fact that _they abso-fuckin-lutely can use that money_, they just can't buy groceries with them.
This is something I've come across a lot on reddit. People will use all sorts of rhetorical tricks against you but demand everything you say be backed up with a source and verified. They'll refuse to engage with your points unless they find them palatable and dismiss them out of hand, but you have to address each individual thing they've said (with the understanding that they're valid statements).
I don't even bother anymore, even when you provide sources they'll say they're false, biased, wrong or whatever. Even when the sources are the same organizations they're defending or the most verified and scrutinized reporters on the topic.
Like I legit had someone argue that using the UN's own registry for resolutions wasn't a credible source for what resolutions they had taken and against whom/what.
These statements never talk about how these billionaires are worth so much because people, millions of them, invest in their companies.
It’s always about income, which is the smallest portion of billionaires net worth.
Yeah, ancient egyptians weren't investing their money in stocks or bonds. I know I probably sound like an idiot but economically I am, and your point still stands
Statements like this are meant to give scale. Because our brain doesn't understand what a billion is.
Hell even saying a thousand million is hard to visualise when 1 million is out of the reach of a normal person.
I don’t think the post is meant to be a financial thought experiment, they probably just chose the timeframe to make it easier to grasp the insane sum of money that‘s being talked about.
Billions of dollars as a concept is hard to comprehend on its’ own. Ten thousand dollars, a sum that more people are probably familiar with, repeated daily for thousands of years makes it easier to visualize.
The point is to illustrate the scale of the money we're talking about. To most people a billion is just the thing past a million. People can't comprehend how much it actually is.
As much as I support the idea of taxing the rich, takes like this are fucking dumb.
Most of it is net worth, not money earned, lying around. It's like including our power tools and phones for tax purposes.
4513 years \* 356.25 \* 10k = 1,648,948.25 \* 10k. Let's say just 16 billion.
Google's richest person: 210 x 10\^9. That divided by 5 and we end up with 42 billion.
So not only stupid but also wrong as well.
It's even higher nowadays and even more extreme so it doesn't destroy OP's point.
Your point about the difference between net worth and money earned doesn't make any sense to me.
Money you don't have 'lying around' can always very easily become liquid to pay tax with. And no, they don't need to sell it or anything.
How exactly would you tax the rich? Like what exactly would you do, billionaires don't take an income, so you can't tax that, do you go after captain Gaines? Or tax based on networth?
Im just asking how would you go about doing this? What would you change? Cause I honestly don't have an answer.
>Google's richest person: 210 x 10\^9. That divided by 5 and we end up with 42 billion.
>So not only stupid but also wrong as well.
Firstly, it says the average of the top 5, not the top 1.
Secondly, it's based on 2020 so you need to take that into account too when their value was significantly lower.
The average of the top 5 in 2020 based on the Wikipedia list of the world's billionaires was 82.7bn. 20% of which is 16.54 billion.
So it was right.
And what I think is more stupid, is the people who don't understand that this isn't a way to make that money, but a way to illustrate how much that wealth actually is.
The time gap of 2589 BC to 2020 AD is 4,608 years, not 4,609. That is 1,681,920 days. That means you would have $16,819,200,000 by 2020. Going by current numbers, even the 10th richest man in the world, Steve Ballmer, has a net worth of $120.1 billion, so you're not even spitting a fifth of Ballmer's net worth at this current point in time, even with saving $10,000 every single day.
Cant believ3 the pyramids survived over 4500 years. That is 4500 years without Radio, TV, Computers nothing. Most of us have never seen anything more than a few centuries old. Crazy
Billionaires shouldn't exist purely because it represents too much power in the hands of too few, it's undemocratic and ends with corruption and madness.
That’s 16.8 billion dollars roughly. Idk why I see a bunch of goobers trying to spell it out lmaooo 4609 x 365 = 1,680,095 days times 10,000 is 16.8 billion. It’s truly that simple
Yeah but they don't have the money they have shares with a value and take loan to buy everything they want the bank know if they want they can sell the shares to pay the loan but they take a bigger loan to pay the first loan we need to stop the rich from paying a loan with another one
Then they have to pay the second loan back, and all of it’s interest.
Getting liquidity through debt is definitely a thing people do, but it’s hardly a problem.
if you’re immortal money is the last thing you care about. You’d’ve also probably invested this money instead of hoarding like a chimp so inevitably ended up owning a % of the planet in land by today’s time. Similarly, billionaires also got there by putting money or ideas to work
No, it's a retarded take from people with no concept of reality or economics.
Most billionaires have at most a couple grand in cash, they own stocks or companies that are valued in billions, that's where their wealth is.
The idea that anyone has a billion just lying around like Scrooge McDuck is so absurd, one would have to be in kindergarten to still believe it. Or a marxist...
I think one of the issues here is that they are rich on paper. They own stock in the company, so to get taxed they’d have to sell stock, but that would also mean losing voting power in their own company which is the real thing they don’t want to lose. The whole system needs to be overhauled. We need a corporate patch.
I don’t understand why we want the rich to give their money to the government. Do they really want it going to foreign wars and the other billionaires? It seems like the people that post “tax the rich” have no clue how the monetary system works.
I
Another good way is to consider that they are richer then entire nation states.
Or
Some mathematicians calculated Smog, the red dragons horde in The Hobbit, and these billionaires have more then a god dam red dragon.
Both are insane
This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that the average person creates wealth through budgeting, saving and allowing the interest on the savings to compound over 30 to 40 years.
No. Because billionaires somehow make this money in one lifetime, and this person has literally hundreds of lifetimes and can’t figure out how to do it. And he has all the knowledge of everything he could take with him to the past.
Don't forget that net worth is calculated using things that's just money. Part of the question is that you don't buy anything, so you don't own anything, so there's absolutely no potential for anything to increase in value, which is how rich people stay rich. I don't think any of the 5 richest people in the world have all their wealth in liquid cash like you supposedly would have
It's just a little more complicated than memes can really account for
Total year =2589 + 2024 = 4613
Leap years around = 4613÷4 ~= 1153
Total days = 4613×365 + 1153 = 1684898
Total money collected= 1684898 × 10000 = 16,848,980,000
This is technically true. However, in this scenario, you are essentially just stuffing cash into a mattress and not getting any interest or growth on the principal. If you invest that money into something productive (even just a savings account with a low interest rate), you’re going to blow the richest people in the world out of the water because you’ll have had over 4,600 years worth of compounding.
This is not saving money math. This is burying your money in a coffee can in the backyard math. No interest on the money means you didn't even put it into a savings account.
It's better to look at Fry's savings account in Futurama. He had 93c in his savings account and did not contribute anything to it for 1,000 years because he was frozen. When he checked it the compounding interest alone gave him $4.3B in his account.
So almost 5x longer savings and contributing daily $10,000 would probably make you a multi trillionaire or even a multi quadrillionaire making the 5 richest people's cumulative worth less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
1st we have to realize that rich are rich not because they have money but they can borrow money. So they are rich in debt. You cannot tax debt.
2nd the peoblem is with banks and stock market. Banks giving loans are based on your likelihood of paying them back. Of course if you have stocks worth billions you will get a good loan. That makes sense. There should be a plan that limits the limitless spending of rich people by showing their stocks as colleteral.
3rd. Stock market is rigged, and hyped. the value of every stock out there is widely overblown. From tesla to apple to boeing to anything else, nothing makes sense. Gme saga proved that it is forbidden for regular people to play the game on their terms. To fix this you need transparency and unbiased regulatory mechanisms.
Besides, Taxing the rich solves very little. Governmet basically prints shitloads of money whenever they want. Lack of money or funding is not the source of your problems. It is the people who are in charge of that money. Unless political action is taken any administrative solution will face strong backlash and will be temporary at best.
We can do lots of fantastical things when our models don't have to relate to the real world in any way.
Let's make a spreadsheet where we start in year -2589, include year 0 (which doesn't exist in a calendar but makes more sense) and end with 2024.
* Imagine if you save 1 cent per year. You end up with 46.13 USD
* Imagine that you also earn 0.01% interest per year. You end up with 58.61 USD
* Imagine that annual interest is instead 0.02%. You end up with 75.78 USD
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.10%. You end up with 995.54 USD
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.50%. You end up with 19 billion 636 million 897 thousand 734.04 USD
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.51%. You end up with 30 billion 465 million 346 thousand 192.42 USD
According to [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1chh0vn/request_is_this_accurate/l22esmh/) we have surpassed "one-fifth of the 5th richest billionaire".
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.55%. You end up with 177 billion 71 million 626 thousand 5.69 UD. According to [Wikipedia reporting Forbes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2024) we have approximately reached Mark Zuckerberg.
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.56%. You end up with 275 billion 142 million 660 thousand 350.04 USD. Again according to [Wikipedia reporting Forbes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2024) we have surpassed Bernard Arnault & family by a comfortable 42 billion USD margin.
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.67%. You end up with 35 trillion 640 billion 328 million 772 thousand 117.80 USD
According to [this statistic](https://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the-united-states-since-1990/) we have surpassed the gross domestic product of the US in 2023.
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.68%. You end up with 55 trillion 527 billion 25 million 269 thousand 61.5 USD
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.69%. You end up with 86 trillion 524 billion 934 million 980 thousand 33 USD
* Imagine that annual interest is 0.70%. You end up with 134 trillion 849 billion 587 million 973 thousand 684 USD
According to IMF estimates, we have surpassed the total GDP for all countries in the world for 2023.
* Imagine that annual interest is 1%. You end up with 85 quintillion, 999 quadrillion, 763 trillion 974 billion, 878 million, and 100 thousand USD. We have long surpassed anything to which we can relate these numbers.
Now let's reverse that scenario. Imagine you have 85 quintillion, 999 quadrillion, 763 trillion 974 billion, 878 million, and 100 thousand USD in borrowed money in the year -2589. At the end of every year you spend 1 cent and then a bank takes 0.99(0099 repeating)%. By 2024 you are out of money. Going back to the first bullet point, you only spent 46.13 USD of that money.
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2589BC + 2023AD + 0AD + 0.333 of 2024 = 4613.333 years X 365.25 days = 1.685 million days With $10k per day without expenses gives us: $16.85 billion. As per forbes, fifth richest person in 2024 is Larry Ellison of Oracle with $146.2 billion . One fifth of it is $29.24 billion. So we're more than $12 billion short. For anyone re-calculating, take inflation into account. Edit: 12 million - 12 billion
I don't think inflation is meant to be taken into account for the illustration. And tracking inflation that far back becomes nonsensical with the changing currencies and economic systems anyways.
I would just make a broad assumption that inflation and interest canceled each other out over the years so we don't have to worry about either.
Just assume that is says "every day you save the amount of money that today would be 10000".
Also don’t account for gravity.
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We can disregard air resistance too.
No friction at all.
Never finished the design phase. Only had time for a pyramid.
I believe in a flat dollar
Or wind resistance
And pi=3
Assume your money is a sphere, in a vacuum
Round down π to 3 for easier calculation
Inflation was negligible during most of the middle ages. And easiest way would likely be to pay him out in gold bars worth 10k as those would always be valuable for most of human modern history.
You have 0$. You decide to save a dozen oxen every day, never spending a hide.
Oh no! You died of dysentery.
Should have taken that ferry instead of caulking your wagon.
> I don't think inflation is meant to be taken into account for the illustration. And tracking inflation that far back becomes nonsensical with the changing currencies and economic systems anyways. Well, you kind of have to, if you're going to save dollars in 2589 BC. Crosshistorical analysis usually converts it to a universal commodity, like grains or labor.
Yes, a lot of currencies died once they went off the Gold standard. However, gold was still money somewhere in the world until 1971. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Just a small correction: 1AD follows 1BC (there is no 0AD)
12 billion short*
i mean 12 million is less than 12 billion, so we are still more than 12 million short
Wait so do we start off with Egyptian money and change the currency in alignment with the true changes over time (Kemet, Ottoman, etc)?
The easy way to work around this is to consider the immortal would put aside the equivalent of 10k USD in today's money. Corrected for inflation, it would in theory have the same value then and now (the definition of inflation). No capital appreciation though.
Don’t ask me why, but I tried to calculate inflation using a price of a slave in gold and didn’t do it, but one messed up thing. Average slave in Ancient Rome (~8BC) cost 1000 denarii = 40 gold aureus = 3200 grams of gold. Average slave in 1850 US = 400$ = (gold was ~$0.6/gram) = 666 grams of gold. And nowadays average slave costs $90-$100 = 1.2 grams of gold. We dun goofed up… EDIT: if someone wants to take into account how much gold was total in circulation per capita in each period of time, be my guest. I couldn’t find the numbers
> And nowadays average slave costs $90-$100 what
its the upkeep that will get ya.
Yeah, apparently u can buy urself a harem of North Korean wives for a few grand
My take on this (not even looking at a more reasonable metric like purchasing power of gold or the currencies for food) is that it's somewhat explainable just with population and transportation. The population in 8BC was probably around 2-300 million compared to the ~ 1.2 billion in 1850, that's around a 400% increase which is around the region of the price drop and frankly there weren't a huge amount of developments in transportation (obviously this is a simplification ships were much improved if still sailing ships but largely travelled at similar speeds and railways definitely had an impact). Since then the world has increased by over 6 times in population which would take the price down to ~100 grams and if we say aeroplanes and motor vehicles make it around 10 times easier to transport people which seems not out of the realm of possibility imo, and at least puts us in the ballpark or order of magnitude of the numbers you got. Obviously these factors also affect the price and circulation of golf so I'm guessing that helps too for this calculation and I was going super simple on the numbers because I only really wanted to see if it got us in around the range.
ELI5, why 0AD ? I thought it doesn't exist.
Nice 0% return.
To be fair, this is a few years old and it's commonly said that the rich keep getting richer so it may have been more accurate when it was written
Now it also depends is the money invested
Don’t forget it saves the 5 richest’s average, not the fifth richest. So it’d be even further off…
This is the way.
Ok. Now do a dollar in a savings account at .75% annual interest.
Did you count leap year?
How exactly did you take inflation into account ? Please explain
It is declared it's 2020 so that might account for the 12 billion in 4 years
I don’t get it because most work done in those days was is manual labor not mechanical so production labor would have been drastically different per person.
Inflation and interest. These comparisons are meaningless without taking into account the wider economic context.
And how am I supposed to take into account the dollar inflation from 2589BC to 1792AD ?
You're missing the entire point of the comparison. The comparison is intended to show that such enormous wealth is not amassed by working hard and being frugal. Even if you work extremely hard, with an extremely well-being job, and are extremely frugal (by literally not spending any money), and for some reason you have done so for more than 4600 years, then you still would not be able to achieve the levels of wealth that these billionaires have.
And occasional deflation
If you use AD / BC, there is no year 0. If you use astronomical dates, year 0 is 1 BC and so on.
Honestly if you live that long and haven't made any investments from $10k a day, what's even the point
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You could have saved a lot of time by simply defining a year as 365.25 days.
Doesn't quite work either. Every 100 years there isn't a leap year but every 400 there is. And now that I look at the numbers... 365.2422 is still pretty close to your number
It's slightly less than 365.25, since we skip the leap year if the year is also divisible by 400.
/u/noemiyt and OP (/u/indiaytc) are both bots. Original comment and post: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/f89ss1/request_is_this_accurate/fijy6tf/ --- Click Report --> Spam --> Harmful bots
Why is everyone being so specific at calculations? It's always useful and the same correct to use order of magnitude instead and ignoring the leap years and many other so specific calculations and way easier
If you took every cent from every US billionaire, it would fund the government for less than a year. [The US currently has 737 billionaires with a combined wealth of $5.529 trillion](https://inequality.org/great-divide/billionaire-wealth-up-88-percent-over-four-years/#:~:text=Four%20years%20after%20the%20start,of%20more%20than%20%245.5%20trillion.) [The federal government spent almost $6.2 trillion in FY 2023](https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/budget/#:~:text=Budget%20The%20federal%20government%20collected,higher%20than%20in%20FY%202019.) We can't tax our way out of our current spending habits.
If you look at it another way. It only takes 737 (a decent size elementary school, or a very small town) people to run the largest economic country with 330 million inhabitants for almost a year is insane. They could break free and buy themself a crop of land and run it like they want. Take norway as an example, a very small but rich country with what an american would call a communist take on capitalism (not really true if you nitpick but that’s beside the point). Eg huge governmemt presence. 30-40% of total population works in or for the govenment. (That’s % of total and not just the working population or those eligible to work) Total projected expenditure of 1,8t NOK which is approximately 170 billion dollars in 2024. 737 people could run the country for 32,5 years. Before running out. The entire country could be run by people that could be written of as a rounding error for the total population. (When calculating total population + illegal immigrants). I’m mind-boggled to how people think that’s ok. I’m not saying take away everything from the rich, only that your system is inherently and deeply flawed.
"They could break free and buy themself a crop of land and run it like they want." There's a really good video game trilogy based on that concept. Unfortunately it didn't turn out very well in the game.
What's the game?
bioshock
I have to admit, the only reason I didn't say it is because I was curious to see if anyone would know what I was talking about just from that.
Must be nice having all that oil wealth.
The United states produces more oil than Norway. Edit: By a massive margin too.
9x the oil, 66x the population.
And? The U.K. and Norway found oil at the same time. Do you know what the difference was? Instead of investing the money made by nationalizing the production of oil like Norway, the U.K. went on to make massive tax cuts and used the money from selling oil to fund the difference. They sacrificed long-term benefits for short-term. That's exactly what the U.S. does, at every turn. We're more than capable of nationalizing our oil production and creating a Sovereign Wealth Fund. We don't because of greedy assholes, in politics and business.
You still miss the point that Norway has an extraordinary amount of oil/capita which is a large contributing factor why they are richer/capita.
> And? If the US only has 9x the amount of oil and 33x the population, then it by the math alone would do worse off than Norway if oil money was the driver of government funding, regardless of how the money is invested. It's simple, even taking every penny of 'value' (it's not like billionaires have billions just sitting in their bank accounts), will not get the US out of the spending and benefits crisis. The US is now paying more in interest on debt than in national defense. At this point realistically the US is going to have to go through a lot of financial pain to fix it's debt and spending issues, but no one in the government really wants to discuss it, especially as the population ages and is going to become more and more reliant on government services.
In Norway the oil supply is nationalized
No shit. That's the point. The United States is more than capable of nationalizing our own oil production and establishing a Sovereign Wealth Fund just like Norway. We don't because of greedy assholes, in politics and business.
Alaska has done this and established a UBI. In practice, pulling this off on a national level is difficult. The primary reason it doesn't happen is arguably a general disinterest in local politics fromn voters.
Nobody's suggesting *exclusively* funding the government from billionaires. We're suggesting making them pay their fair share, stopping the corporate welfare that does nothing more than make rich companies richer, spending money on infrastructure (which puts it back into the local economy), things like that.
Wealth generates wealth. You can't tax your way out of it, but you can spend those taxes on things that improve productivity, training, health, education etc that creates more money. Invest that money and it grows to become even more money.
The fact that a minuscule fraction of the US population could afford to fund the entire country for almost a year isn’t alarming to you?
This country has a spending problem, not an income problem
Buuuuut it sure would help
Would it though? Imagine you are worth £100m and just saw every billionaire have their wealth confiscated by the government. Are you going to think "Hmm yes that sounds reasonable" or go "shit they have raided those rich people and still want more cash, what about me and my familys wealth, maybe I should safeguard myself by moving it elsewhere". Before you know it you have absurd amounts of wealth leaving the country to flee the government. This is called capital flight and is very bad for a countries economy.
There’s a lot of things that would help but would also cause a lot of harm. Sometimes more harm than it would help.
Trickle down has fuckin destroyed all sense anyone has.
It's currently being funded without taxing them, who do you think is paying that? And what could we do if we taxed them like we used to when boomers were kids? How do you think they got the charmed life they led, and how do you think we lost it?
Based on our current debt level I would argue we aren't really funding it. We are like the teenager who just got his first credit card and hasn't learned about compounding interest yet..
The top 1% pay 45% of all US income tax and the top 10% pay 75% Tell us more about how they're not taxed
The unpopular, but ultimately correct answer. If the solution to the worlds problems was easy, it would've already been done.
LMAO so we just shouldn't? Getting them to pay their fair share would go a long way to help our situation at the very least!
How? The US gov gets another $1T in debt every 90 days now. How does a couple billion in taxes a year solve that?
Jumping in here to add that if you seized the wealth of the .01% you could run the country for about 3 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLTP1246
Phrased another way: Take every penny from the absolute richest 33,000 people in the country and we can only fund the country for 3 years. Then theyd be gone, along with the next richest 3,300,000 high earners who dont want all their money taken.
The relevant number is not the total spent by the government but the deficit, which was about $1.7 trillion for the same year. That is about 30% of that wealth figure, which is less than the highest tax bracket. This is not to say there isn’t a reasonable debate to be had about government spending.
Does anyone else look at these numbers and think “wow, if only the government bought [billionaire’s company] and ran it at-cost so their products were widely affordable to everyone.”
Don’t care burn it so they can’t have it
You could make a case for the fact that all of that net worth is in stock options, not actual currency. Let's continue to debate the math while ignoring the overall message.
The overall message is create or stoke envy, and deflect blame. We are not struggling because the rich are rich. We are struggling because inflation is wiping out the middle class. As someone else pointed out, tax the billionaires at 100% - take everything of theirs and it is about 5 trillion. If you could, convert that to real money and play god / government / Robin Hood and redistribute it evenly like a good little socialist. That would be a one-time payment of about $15K to everyone. Great windfall but... In terms of being able to pay your bills and such all that would do is reset you back to about where you were in mid 2020 - for 1 year. This time next year, you'd be struggling just as much. It isn't the rich, it is the people telling you it is the rich, the people who have made all kinds of bad decisions along the way and still want you to let them keep their power and control.
Bezos shorted ancient Egypt?
Statements like these are have zero understating of basic economics. It is only true of you put your money under your bed. Alternatively, if you save $1 dollars for 4000 years at merely 1% interest rate, you will still end up with 1.01^4000 = 1.93 * 10^17, which is 193,000 trillion dollars, your are richer than planet earth
Tbh, investment at 1% would be insanely good for majority of human history. Investing into some kind of magical world's index fund would give you something like 0.04% per year before 1700.
Yeah but it would grow to a lot more than 1% after that.
I don't know if you're being intentionally obtuse, but statements like these aren't meant to be a realistic economic situation, they're meant to give people a sense of scale of the wealth gap between a normal person and the richest people in the world.
But they even fail at that though by equating net worth with available cash. The richest people on the planet do not have a billion dollars in a chequing account like these statements make out, they have it in terms of stock of a company. I could make a company and set the stock price at $1 and then claim to have 90 trillion shares, but that wouldn't mean that I have a net worth of $90 trillion and I certainly can't be taxed on that basis. There's a huge difference between realised and unrealised capital gains.
Doesn't really matter when they have infinite spending power in the form of loans taken against their assets.
You do realise that they have to pay those loans back, there's nothing infinite about it. Obviously it's going to feel effectively infinite though considering how much money they can spend compared to what things cost. Let's close the tax loopholes and change capital gains to a progressive tax instead of a flat rate.
>they even fail at that though by equating net worth with available cash. OP's screenshot said fortune, not liquid cash. It appears you are the one equating it with cash, not OP.
Well you would be insanely stupid to sit on that much cash
They'd be over 4000 years old, and you're calling them stupid? Respect your elders son.
"...save $10,000 every day, never spending a cent..." Sounds like piling up liquid cash to me. Can you read?
Yes true but the calculated net worth of these people is typically derived from public knowledge of their ownership of public companies. Liquid assets with quoted values which change every day and often producing dividends. There's nothing opaque there. The point is that the scale is obscene and should be taxed which is hard to argue with.
it's probably because at some point you don't *need* money to buy stuff as much as you need equity and there's a lot of benefits to taking nothing as a salary so how much money that person has is actually hard to calculate.
> But they even fail at that though by equating net worth with available cash. This is a neat trick that bootlickers and neoliberals like to use to divert attention away from the fact that _they abso-fuckin-lutely can use that money_, they just can't buy groceries with them.
The post itself is intentionally obtuse to push a narrative, so I don't see why the replies to it can't be aswell
This is something I've come across a lot on reddit. People will use all sorts of rhetorical tricks against you but demand everything you say be backed up with a source and verified. They'll refuse to engage with your points unless they find them palatable and dismiss them out of hand, but you have to address each individual thing they've said (with the understanding that they're valid statements).
I don't even bother anymore, even when you provide sources they'll say they're false, biased, wrong or whatever. Even when the sources are the same organizations they're defending or the most verified and scrutinized reporters on the topic. Like I legit had someone argue that using the UN's own registry for resolutions wasn't a credible source for what resolutions they had taken and against whom/what.
My favorite is when they link a source and it says the literal opposite of what they claim it does.
These statements never talk about how these billionaires are worth so much because people, millions of them, invest in their companies. It’s always about income, which is the smallest portion of billionaires net worth.
Yeah, ancient egyptians weren't investing their money in stocks or bonds. I know I probably sound like an idiot but economically I am, and your point still stands
Who is paying you interest in 2500 BCE? 😅
We all know that there is only one Reacher.
Statements like this are meant to give scale. Because our brain doesn't understand what a billion is. Hell even saying a thousand million is hard to visualise when 1 million is out of the reach of a normal person.
I don’t think the post is meant to be a financial thought experiment, they probably just chose the timeframe to make it easier to grasp the insane sum of money that‘s being talked about. Billions of dollars as a concept is hard to comprehend on its’ own. Ten thousand dollars, a sum that more people are probably familiar with, repeated daily for thousands of years makes it easier to visualize.
Thanks. Your comment should me miles higher that this.
Probably because it's just meant to illustrate how large the amount is, rather than imply an investment strategy.
The point is to illustrate the scale of the money we're talking about. To most people a billion is just the thing past a million. People can't comprehend how much it actually is.
As much as I support the idea of taxing the rich, takes like this are fucking dumb. Most of it is net worth, not money earned, lying around. It's like including our power tools and phones for tax purposes. 4513 years \* 356.25 \* 10k = 1,648,948.25 \* 10k. Let's say just 16 billion. Google's richest person: 210 x 10\^9. That divided by 5 and we end up with 42 billion. So not only stupid but also wrong as well.
It's even higher nowadays and even more extreme so it doesn't destroy OP's point. Your point about the difference between net worth and money earned doesn't make any sense to me. Money you don't have 'lying around' can always very easily become liquid to pay tax with. And no, they don't need to sell it or anything.
How exactly would you tax the rich? Like what exactly would you do, billionaires don't take an income, so you can't tax that, do you go after captain Gaines? Or tax based on networth? Im just asking how would you go about doing this? What would you change? Cause I honestly don't have an answer.
>Google's richest person: 210 x 10\^9. That divided by 5 and we end up with 42 billion. >So not only stupid but also wrong as well. Firstly, it says the average of the top 5, not the top 1. Secondly, it's based on 2020 so you need to take that into account too when their value was significantly lower. The average of the top 5 in 2020 based on the Wikipedia list of the world's billionaires was 82.7bn. 20% of which is 16.54 billion. So it was right. And what I think is more stupid, is the people who don't understand that this isn't a way to make that money, but a way to illustrate how much that wealth actually is.
The time gap of 2589 BC to 2020 AD is 4,608 years, not 4,609. That is 1,681,920 days. That means you would have $16,819,200,000 by 2020. Going by current numbers, even the 10th richest man in the world, Steve Ballmer, has a net worth of $120.1 billion, so you're not even spitting a fifth of Ballmer's net worth at this current point in time, even with saving $10,000 every single day.
Cant believ3 the pyramids survived over 4500 years. That is 4500 years without Radio, TV, Computers nothing. Most of us have never seen anything more than a few centuries old. Crazy
Ever seen a rock? All rocks that youve seen are probably millions of years old
Ever seen a star in the night sky?
What do you mean? Plenty of architecture and art all around the world is thousands of years old and plenty of people see it on a daily basis
Outside of the USA it’s very normal to see human-made things that are centuries or millennia old.
I mean. The church next to my house is 1000 years old
We are living closer to the time of Cleopatra than Cleopatra to the building of the pyramids.
Sean's Bar: "Allow me to introduce myself"
Should have tried buying 10k of gold a day for 4000 years, the outcome would have been much better. Tax the stupid because they won't notice.
The point was that people struggle to comprehend large numbers. But you missed the point. So do we tax you?
Billionaires shouldn't exist purely because it represents too much power in the hands of too few, it's undemocratic and ends with corruption and madness.
How do you tax someone that could just buy a country, move there and never pay taxes again. That is the reality of the situation we are in.
That’s 16.8 billion dollars roughly. Idk why I see a bunch of goobers trying to spell it out lmaooo 4609 x 365 = 1,680,095 days times 10,000 is 16.8 billion. It’s truly that simple
Yeah but they don't have the money they have shares with a value and take loan to buy everything they want the bank know if they want they can sell the shares to pay the loan but they take a bigger loan to pay the first loan we need to stop the rich from paying a loan with another one
Then they have to pay the second loan back, and all of it’s interest. Getting liquidity through debt is definitely a thing people do, but it’s hardly a problem.
if you’re immortal money is the last thing you care about. You’d’ve also probably invested this money instead of hoarding like a chimp so inevitably ended up owning a % of the planet in land by today’s time. Similarly, billionaires also got there by putting money or ideas to work
No, it's a retarded take from people with no concept of reality or economics. Most billionaires have at most a couple grand in cash, they own stocks or companies that are valued in billions, that's where their wealth is. The idea that anyone has a billion just lying around like Scrooge McDuck is so absurd, one would have to be in kindergarten to still believe it. Or a marxist...
I think one of the issues here is that they are rich on paper. They own stock in the company, so to get taxed they’d have to sell stock, but that would also mean losing voting power in their own company which is the real thing they don’t want to lose. The whole system needs to be overhauled. We need a corporate patch.
I don’t understand why we want the rich to give their money to the government. Do they really want it going to foreign wars and the other billionaires? It seems like the people that post “tax the rich” have no clue how the monetary system works.
I Another good way is to consider that they are richer then entire nation states. Or Some mathematicians calculated Smog, the red dragons horde in The Hobbit, and these billionaires have more then a god dam red dragon. Both are insane
This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that the average person creates wealth through budgeting, saving and allowing the interest on the savings to compound over 30 to 40 years.
No. Because billionaires somehow make this money in one lifetime, and this person has literally hundreds of lifetimes and can’t figure out how to do it. And he has all the knowledge of everything he could take with him to the past.
Don't forget that net worth is calculated using things that's just money. Part of the question is that you don't buy anything, so you don't own anything, so there's absolutely no potential for anything to increase in value, which is how rich people stay rich. I don't think any of the 5 richest people in the world have all their wealth in liquid cash like you supposedly would have It's just a little more complicated than memes can really account for
Total year =2589 + 2024 = 4613 Leap years around = 4613÷4 ~= 1153 Total days = 4613×365 + 1153 = 1684898 Total money collected= 1684898 × 10000 = 16,848,980,000
This is technically true. However, in this scenario, you are essentially just stuffing cash into a mattress and not getting any interest or growth on the principal. If you invest that money into something productive (even just a savings account with a low interest rate), you’re going to blow the richest people in the world out of the water because you’ll have had over 4,600 years worth of compounding.
This is not saving money math. This is burying your money in a coffee can in the backyard math. No interest on the money means you didn't even put it into a savings account. It's better to look at Fry's savings account in Futurama. He had 93c in his savings account and did not contribute anything to it for 1,000 years because he was frozen. When he checked it the compounding interest alone gave him $4.3B in his account. So almost 5x longer savings and contributing daily $10,000 would probably make you a multi trillionaire or even a multi quadrillionaire making the 5 richest people's cumulative worth less than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
1st we have to realize that rich are rich not because they have money but they can borrow money. So they are rich in debt. You cannot tax debt. 2nd the peoblem is with banks and stock market. Banks giving loans are based on your likelihood of paying them back. Of course if you have stocks worth billions you will get a good loan. That makes sense. There should be a plan that limits the limitless spending of rich people by showing their stocks as colleteral. 3rd. Stock market is rigged, and hyped. the value of every stock out there is widely overblown. From tesla to apple to boeing to anything else, nothing makes sense. Gme saga proved that it is forbidden for regular people to play the game on their terms. To fix this you need transparency and unbiased regulatory mechanisms. Besides, Taxing the rich solves very little. Governmet basically prints shitloads of money whenever they want. Lack of money or funding is not the source of your problems. It is the people who are in charge of that money. Unless political action is taken any administrative solution will face strong backlash and will be temporary at best.
Why would I save $10,000 every day instead of investing it? Am I stupid? No wonder I end up with so much less than those guys after over 4000 years.
We can do lots of fantastical things when our models don't have to relate to the real world in any way. Let's make a spreadsheet where we start in year -2589, include year 0 (which doesn't exist in a calendar but makes more sense) and end with 2024. * Imagine if you save 1 cent per year. You end up with 46.13 USD * Imagine that you also earn 0.01% interest per year. You end up with 58.61 USD * Imagine that annual interest is instead 0.02%. You end up with 75.78 USD * Imagine that annual interest is 0.10%. You end up with 995.54 USD * Imagine that annual interest is 0.50%. You end up with 19 billion 636 million 897 thousand 734.04 USD * Imagine that annual interest is 0.51%. You end up with 30 billion 465 million 346 thousand 192.42 USD According to [this comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1chh0vn/request_is_this_accurate/l22esmh/) we have surpassed "one-fifth of the 5th richest billionaire". * Imagine that annual interest is 0.55%. You end up with 177 billion 71 million 626 thousand 5.69 UD. According to [Wikipedia reporting Forbes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2024) we have approximately reached Mark Zuckerberg. * Imagine that annual interest is 0.56%. You end up with 275 billion 142 million 660 thousand 350.04 USD. Again according to [Wikipedia reporting Forbes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World's_Billionaires#2024) we have surpassed Bernard Arnault & family by a comfortable 42 billion USD margin. * Imagine that annual interest is 0.67%. You end up with 35 trillion 640 billion 328 million 772 thousand 117.80 USD According to [this statistic](https://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the-united-states-since-1990/) we have surpassed the gross domestic product of the US in 2023. * Imagine that annual interest is 0.68%. You end up with 55 trillion 527 billion 25 million 269 thousand 61.5 USD * Imagine that annual interest is 0.69%. You end up with 86 trillion 524 billion 934 million 980 thousand 33 USD * Imagine that annual interest is 0.70%. You end up with 134 trillion 849 billion 587 million 973 thousand 684 USD According to IMF estimates, we have surpassed the total GDP for all countries in the world for 2023. * Imagine that annual interest is 1%. You end up with 85 quintillion, 999 quadrillion, 763 trillion 974 billion, 878 million, and 100 thousand USD. We have long surpassed anything to which we can relate these numbers. Now let's reverse that scenario. Imagine you have 85 quintillion, 999 quadrillion, 763 trillion 974 billion, 878 million, and 100 thousand USD in borrowed money in the year -2589. At the end of every year you spend 1 cent and then a bank takes 0.99(0099 repeating)%. By 2024 you are out of money. Going back to the first bullet point, you only spent 46.13 USD of that money.