The rich and the richer

Regardless of who is richer from one day to the next, both of these technology barons have an estimated fortune of about $120 billion, which is such a staggering amount of money as to be nearly unimaginable in anything but an abstract way.

To put it into some form of perspective, a person earning the average wage of about $25 an hour would have to be at their desk for 120 million weeks to earn the same, or work the equivalent of 46,153 life times. If you combined their individual wealth they have as much as the entire population of New Zealand is able to produce in a year.

What else is truly staggering is that when Gates first reached the pinnacle of world richest man in 1995, he did so with $17b.

That wouldn’t even get him in the top 20 these days and even accounting for inflation this points to an incredible escalation of the concentration of wealth.

Or, in other words, the gap between the haves and the have nots has gotten bigger. Much bigger. Sure, the world has got wealthier at the same time but it would appear we are more unequal than just a few decades ago. Economically, at least.

But it’s not all bad. For that concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny group of men we have got such conveniences as easily understandable computing (Gates), cheap online shopping (Bezos), smart social networking (Mark Zuckerberg) and phones (the late Steve Jobs) that give everyone with access to a mobile network a window into the world.

In time these super rich men will also bring us driverless cars, private space travel and space colonies, household robots, artificial intelligence, and all manner of things we haven’t thought of yet.

That’s what having billions of dollars lets you do. It gives you the power to make your dreams, even the really, really big ones, come true just as you imagined them.

Of course whether this will be of net benefit to our civilisation in the long term is impossible to answer now.

In the meantime it’s enough to know that without people to buy their stuff these men could never be as wealthy as they are now and so they have a vested interest in keeping us all happy, healthy and in good jobs that give us fat pay cheques.

That’s the half glass full theory.