Gross planetary GDP (GWP- gross world product) is on the order of $85Tn. Or Elon Musk's avowed goal of colonizing Mars.Ĭontra which, I would argue that in planetary terms a billion dollars is peanuts. For example, there's the Gates Foundation's much-touted goal of eliminating childhood diseases of poverty in South-East Asia (which I haven't heard much about since COVID19 hit-or, for that matter, since the allegations of a Gates-Epstein surfaced in the press). Which leads to the second common argument for tolerating billionaires: that they have the resources to undertake tasks that governments decline to address. So, personal wealth has an upper bound beyond which the numbers are meaningless. In other words, in personal terms the marginal utility of money diminishes all the way to zero. Most liver transplant recipients are only able to register in one state within the USA Jobs was registered in two or three.) But at that point, it did not matter how many billions he had: once you've got the jet and are registered with every major transplant centre within flight range, no extra amount of money is going to improve your chances of survival. (Livers are notoriously short-lived outside the donor body. As a billionaire, he could do more than that: he reputedly kept a business jet on 24x7 standby to whisk him to any hospital in the United States where a histocompatible liver for transplant surgery became available. As a very rich man, he could afford the best healthcare. Crude arguments that "greed is good" are all very well, but it begs the question of what positive good billionaires contribute to the commonweal-beyond a certain point the diminishing marginal utility of money means that every extra million or billion dollars changes nothing significant in the recipient's life.įor example, Steve Jobs had pancreatic cancer, as a result of which his liver was failing (after he underwent a pancreaticoduodenectomy ). There's a very fertile field of what I can only describe as capitalist apologetics, wherein economists and others try to justify the existence of billionaires in terms of social utility.
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