The most successful hedge fund manager on Wall Street made nearly $3 million dollars last year (by betting against the sub-prime market and thereby compounding the misery of millions of Americans).
It would take the average American, on the average US salary, 80,000 years to earn that amount of money (Yes, that's 80,000 years).
If 80,000 years is difficult to grasp, suffice it to say that 80,000 years ago, hunter gatherers were busy migrating out of Africa. If the average American, on the average salary, (let alone the rest of us on the planet) were to accumulate as much wealth as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, it would take 800,000 years, which, going back in time, was when Yunxian man in China were using hand axes in the early Stone Age - the Lower Paleolithic period.
It would probably take a lot longer than that to accumulate a Bill Gates fortune for an average American because their salaries would be taxed at source and they wouldn't have access to fancy tax avoidance accountants - probably another million years or so.
For a poor African, struggling to survive, it would take about 80 million (yes, million) years to accumulate a Bill Gates fortune - you would have had to have been a hard-working fossil in the Cambrian era to have accumulated that sort of wealth .
Many animal species appeared at that time, so assuming they had developed a banking system with high interest loans and credit facilities and developed a system of mortgages on sedimentary rocks. Perhaps they had a bank called 'Sedimentary Rock'. But again, the poor African subjected to the average American's tax bill, would have taken twice as long to accumulate Bill Gates' fortune. Going back in time, Homo Erectus was ruling the roost.
© Andrew Hawkins 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment