Comment by dsp1234
9 years ago
Caveats: GDP is no way to calculate wealth, and comparing the total GDP to any one person's wealth is pretty useless.
Let's say the total GDP over the last 40 years was 300 trillion dollars. Also, let's say Bill Gates's wealth is 100 billion dollars (for ease of calculation).
100B / 300T = 0.003 = .3% of 40 years of GDP
Let's say that the average population of the US during that 40 year period was 170M[0].
170M * 40 years = 6.8B person-years of work (PYoW).
Bill gates contributed 40 PYoW to the GDP, which is 0.000000059% of the GDP.
However, he captured .3% of the GDP as current wealth (not including wealth spent during that 40 years)
That means his wealth capture is 5 million times the "average".
That 'tiny sliver' is anything but.
You are just beating on the fact that I based the comparison on the total rather than the mean GDP available to an individual.
But that was the point of my post, to compare the captured wealth to consumption. People always talk about how the wealthy are screwing the rest of us over and everything would be great if they weren't taking so much, but it turns out that consumption is also a huge portion of the economy. Total wealth in the US is on the order of $100 trillion (this includes all housing and so on). Consumption of several trillion dollars a year adds up to that pretty quick and seizing it all and turning it into circuses isn't going to go very far.
Which isn't to say I am against programs that result in wealth transfer, it just pays to try to look at things clearly.
You are just beating on the fact that I based the comparison on the total rather than the mean GDP available to an individual.
I addressed the comment you made, not the comment you didn't make.
Feel free to explain how Something like $0.1 trillion out of several hundred trillion dollars. is not a comparison of Bill Gate's wealth to total GDP over the period he captured it.
I mean, I didn't painstakingly lay out my meaning, but there you go.