I wrote a while back about David Chandler’s l-curve. Recently I read an interesting factoid and I thought I would do an alternate version.
In March 2007 Forbes reported 946 billionaires in the US with combined net worth of $3.5 trillion.
So, just like the l-curve, we line all the households in the US up along a football field, but this time we tell them to get into groups of 1000 with the people near them. Next, we give each group their annual income in $10,000 bills.
Standing at the 50 yard line are the median 1000 families with $50,233,000[1] stacked up a whopping 1.8 inches.
At the far end of the field are those billionaires with their $3.6 trillion. Their stack is 24 miles tall. Whatever your salary, consider it in $10,000 bills, then try to imagine 360 million of them stacked up to four and a half times the height of Mount Everest. If the $3.6 trillion were in $1 bills, they would reach 244,318 miles, and the moon would knock the stack over as it passed overhead.
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If a big wind comes and blows there stack over, how likely are the rest of us to end up with something worth having?
My goal is to knock it over with a more efficient market system based on revisiting some of the fundamental assumptions of the web.
Did you know that the fundamental metaphors of the web have not been altered since they were designed in 1994 when 40mb of storage cost $1000 and there was no such thing as broadband?
I’m playing around with a system that I’m hoping will act as the basis for a more efficient market system. By making it easier for people to exchange time, goods and money more efficiently, I’m hoping to cut into the competitive advantages that centralized systems have currently.
Someone needs to do something, I’m in England right now and they’re got Wal-marts here now. The one I was in the other night was doing steady business and over time that starts to mean the same homogenization here that we are seeing in much of the States.
I’m working on getting the basic technology and business theory together for a presentation at Burning Man at the end of August. I’ll send you a link when it gets a bit more coherent.
You graph is scary. Is wealth in the us really distrubuted that unevenly?
Yeah, there are several problems that our distribution systems have currently that exist because people have a poor intuitive grasp of large numbers.
The upside though is that this means the wealth for eliminating poverty is already here, we just have to redistribute it.
You’re right Will so give me some of your money.
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