A Billion Here, A Billion There. . . .
posted by Frank Pasquale
I appreciate Nate’s effort to bring home the enormousness of the numbers now routinely thrown around in discussions of the financial crisis. Serendipitously, I happened upon this language from Phyllis Tickle in her book, Greed:
In 1998 a billion dollars was the total lifetime output of 20,000 American workers; and every billionaire absorbed the entire cradle-to-grave productive life of another 20,000 of his fellow citizens every time he grew his fortune by another billion.
As Brad Delong notes, “Not even the richest of the pre-Civil War southern slaveholders disposed of that much property.”
As deregulatory delusions come crashing up against the reality of reckless speculation on Wall Street, we might want to reconsider exactly what our financial system has been designed for. Channeling investment to productive purposes? Stability and transparency? Or providing opportunities for decimillionaires to become centimillionaires and centimillionaires to become billionaires?
The system unfailingly provided ever-expanding bonuses to Wall Street traders during the boom years. I hope that those who blame their “unbridled greed” for the mess propose to tax the wealth it brought in order to help pay for the endless bailouts we apparently are now obliged to finance. But I’m not holding my breath.
September 16, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law
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Responses (1)
Mike Friedman - September 24, 2008 at 5:49 am
“In 1998 a billion dollars was the total lifetime output of 20,000 American workers; ”
Really?
1 billion / 20,000 = 50,000. Are you suggesting that the total lifetime output of an American worker in 1998 was just $50,000?
Phyllis Tickle and her editors may be innumerate idiots – I don’t know anything about them but I tend to be suspicious of people who write / publish class war books – but you guys are serious people… didn’t you read this and just scratch your heads and say “Those numbers look a bit off”?
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