Comment by rayiner
9 hours ago
Most people aren't capable of understanding numbers: https://politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math.... You can't educate them to do it, any more than you can educate your average person to be able to reliably hit three pointers. It's a physical limitation.
That's why socialization is so important. You can't get voters to understand the difference between billions and trillions or put anything in context when the numbers get that big. All you can do is socialize them from an early age to have directionally correct gut feelings like, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "saving is good."
Hilarious. They were right to do the comparison, but got it oh so wrong.
I was recently trying to understand Elon Musk's wealth, and come up with similar comparison: For example, he could make millionaire's of every single person in Seattle, and still have hundreds billions of dollars of wealth left over. Truly mind boggling.
Elon doesn't have a pile of cash, and it wouldn't be possible to convert his assets into cash either (without an incredible discount). This is true for most billionaires. In fact this very fallacy is part of what I'm alluding to with "we need to educate better".
So while fun thought experiments are excellent selling points, they aren't actually grounded in reality.
Yeah, but you're not required to transfer cash in order to transfer wealth, are you? Stocks are plenty transferable. Sure, the value would likely drop, but what's 20% to 40%, when you have a trillion to start.
He could totally go into debt for e.g. 80% or his accumulated wealth, designate said wealth as collateral and get a really good deal in terms of interest.