Mathematically, I think it’s hard for people to truly understand the obscene wealth that some people have accumulated. 100 billion doesn’t sound that different than 100 million.
100 million is magnitudes closer to ZERO than it is to 100 billion.
The difference between 1 million and 1 billion is roughly 1 billion.
No. It’s a thousand. Which is closer to zero than a billion.Edit: You’re talking absolute values so the difference is 999 million.
While I was talking ratios hence the ratio being 1:1000. My bad.
lol. I think your post shows just how hard it is to fathom a billion better than any numbers could.
I think it helps to convert the same ratios to easily understood dollars.
So $1 is to $1000 (one thousand) what $1000 dollars is to $1,000,000 (one million) is what $1,000,000 (one million) is to 1,000,000,000 (one billion).
Best illustration I had read was the “stairwell” analogy.
Each step is a net worth of +$100k.
10 steps on the staircase, you have $1M. Imagine being 10 steps up on the stairs - higher than most, but really you can still see them, relate…
Now if 10 stpes = 1M, 10,000 steps = 1B.
The empire state building is ~1500 steps. 1B is about 6.5 Empire State buildings of height.
Musk has a net worth of 450B.
That’s 450 x 10,000, that’s 4,500,000 steps, or about 3,000 Empire State buildings, or comfortably in low earth orbit.
So when you look down at those on ground floor or those 10 steps above ground, the difference to you is not only inconsequential, it’s literally unnoticeable
So if that’s the median, you need about half a million to be considered “Middle class” now?
Looks at housing prices… Yeah, sounds about right.
Incorrectly conflating class with income level is exactly why working class Americans have believed they’re “middle class” for decades.
