I like this conceptualisation: let’s say you need $20b to make the rich list.
If you earned $1m a year, you’d need to work for 20,000 years.
If you earned $1m a day, every day of the year, you’d still need 55 years: probably your entire working life. If you only worked weekdays, you need to work for 80 years: your entire life.
If you want to make it to the top ten: just add a zero to each of those numbers: 200,000 years, 550 years, 800 years.
That’s a pretty good idea. I just dislike the concept of money being a resource.
I would like to convey that money is just a bunch of IOY (I owe You) society prints to be exchanged for goods and services.
Billionaires are receiving a lot of IOYs, but can we really say they’re “earning” them?
That’s why I’m comparing their “earnings” with our top of the top of the top, the people that work the hardest, know the most and provide a crucial service to society. (There are more, but their salaries are hilariously unfair, also known as teachers).
No one earns more than their labour could possibly produce. That labour however does have greater or lesser value to society, hence different pay rates.
My example above show that it’s impossible for any one human to earn that much even if they were immortal and had lived since Homo Sapien migrated out of Africa.
That we have billionaires shows that a very large amount of people have been paid far far less than their labour was worth.
That value extraction goes away when labour owns the means of production the employees own the company (i.e. employees are the shareholders and reap the dividends).
I like this conceptualisation: let’s say you need $20b to make the rich list.
If you earned $1m a year, you’d need to work for 20,000 years.
If you earned $1m a day, every day of the year, you’d still need 55 years: probably your entire working life. If you only worked weekdays, you need to work for 80 years: your entire life.
If you want to make it to the top ten: just add a zero to each of those numbers: 200,000 years, 550 years, 800 years.
That’s a pretty good idea. I just dislike the concept of money being a resource. I would like to convey that money is just a bunch of IOY (I owe You) society prints to be exchanged for goods and services. Billionaires are receiving a lot of IOYs, but can we really say they’re “earning” them?
That’s why I’m comparing their “earnings” with our top of the top of the top, the people that work the hardest, know the most and provide a crucial service to society. (There are more, but their salaries are hilariously unfair, also known as teachers).
Sorry about the rant. :-/
No one earns more than their labour could possibly produce. That labour however does have greater or lesser value to society, hence different pay rates.
My example above show that it’s impossible for any one human to earn that much even if they were immortal and had lived since Homo Sapien migrated out of Africa.
That we have billionaires shows that a very large amount of people have been paid far far less than their labour was worth.
That value extraction goes away when
labour owns the means of productionthe employees own the company (i.e. employees are the shareholders and reap the dividends).