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Representing the Masses

I always find having a bit of perspective useful. Getting a little distance to see the whole canvas before adding more paint, or putting complicated processes into a story that connects the dots. When it comes to the big numbers they talk about on the news, it is also useful to get a feel for what they actually mean.

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1 Million

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That dot represents a million dollars.

When I was a kid, people would talk about being a millionaire and say things like "if I had a million dollars" as if it was a large amount of money. And honestly, it was a large amount at the time, because with that kind of principle just in the bank, the interest accrued would be over twice the average salary. It would mean living financially free. These days though, a million is the median house price in an Australian city, and the interest rates offered by banks don't compare.

1 Billion

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Those dots represent a billion dollars.

There are a thousand dots there. Around the same time in 1987, there were 13 billionaires in the US and 140 billionaires in the world. Today, there are 989 in the US and 3428 known globally. And for a little more perspective, their combined wealth has increased 25% from 16 trillion to over 20 trillion in the last 12 months. And for a little more perspective, that means if all the billionaires on earth pooled their wealth, they still couldn't quite pay even half of the US national debt. The takeaway there should be, that it is never going to be paid. EVER.

1 Trillion x 1000

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I don't think I can submit the representation of a trillion to the blockchain, because it would be too many characters.

However, it would be the 1000 above times 1000. One million fullstops. And the US owes over 40x that amount, as it uses debt to fund its consumer and political campaigns to keep it in power, knowing full-well that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. It is all going to collapse. But again, having a bit of understanding what these big numbers means can help us realise how out of sync this economic world is. The resources are very poorly distributed and are instead actively used to accrue more wealth, at the cost of the health of the majority of people.

For another quick and dirty representation of a million through to a trillion, time is a good representation.

1,000 seconds: About 17 minutes
1 million seconds: About 11.5 days
1 billion seconds: About 31.7 years
1 trillion seconds: About 31,709 years

But let's have a bit of fun with it and add another factor into the mix. Let's say you have to pay a dollar a minute for your life. 60 dollars an hour to keep on living.

1,000 dollars: About 16.6 hours
1 million dollars:: About 695 days days
1 billion dollars:: About 1,902 years
1 trillion dollars:: About 1,901,324 years

How long would you currently live?

So with that scenario, the average trillionaire would be able to live over six times longer than homo sapiens have existed. Well, the average trillionaire was a minority of one, but the count is currently sitting at zero as of right now.

These simple little thought exercises are a good way to remind me of how bad I am at actually imagining what these large numbers mean. I know it from a mental level, but I don't really get the sense of what it means from an emotional level. When I hear that a government is spending a billion dollars on something, or a trillion dollars as the case might be in the US, it doesn't really throw up the flashing warning lights it should. A trillion dollars is 1 million, million-dollar homes. Spend that on housing and every homeless person living in the US as of today, could be living in a million-dollar home. Yet, there aren't even close to enough homeless shelter beds to house them each night.

A lot of money is being spent each minute of each day, all over the world, but is it being well spent? I am not saying we should just look at housing the homeless, but I would posit that the majority of resources are not being used to improve human life much at all, and only a small sliver is really making an impact. But, as small as that impact is, it gets negated completely by the amount of negative impact that is made concurrently.

Money is meaningless.

Yet, it is the way we track our activity, so we give it meaning. Money itself and the tracking doesn't care what it is spent on or where it flows, it just shifts where it is pushed. However, we as humans live the experience of our actions and that means that money is also tracking our actions. The majority of people in this world are suffering. There is war, famine, violence. This is the culmination of our actions and because money has been used as the indicator of success, it show our actions have led us to this point.

Buying more money at the cost of human suffering.

You might not be suffering right now, but that doesn't mean you won't be in the future, nor does it mean you will remain unaffected. The thing is, that even the richest of us today, are destined to live our experience here on earth. It doesn't matter how wealthy one is, we are all in the same environment. It might not seem so today, with tropical islands, hidden underground bunkers and mega yachts, but the larger that wealth gap grows, the worse the condition of the world in which we live, because that wealth is generated through our actions - and there is always a price to pay.

It is a physical law. Action creates reaction.

Money itself isn't the problem, it is just a marker, like those fullstops above. It is what that money represents, our actions, that is the problem. We are trading away the health of our environment and our species in the pursuit to maximise something that is only representative. It is like collecting the word "orange" in an attempt to get Vitamin-C.

But, just like those big numbers that we do not have an intuition for, we have been so conditioned by the way we are doing things today, that we can't imagine what a different economic set of practices might look like, let alone the impacts it would make on the things that actually matter to us. If we changed our actions, would war, famine and violence look the same as it does today? Would the suffering of people physically, mentally and emotionally stay the same? Would the environment continue on its decline into unliveable conditions? Would the waterways and air remain polluted?

Change one thing, everything changes.

And it is a big change to make.

But while everyone would benefit from the change, a few would benefit monetarily less than they are today, and maintain less power over the people they control.

And that is not a perspective they want to experience.

Taraz
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