disregarding all problems associated with this happening…
how much money would each person have if america distributed wealth equally? so that each person got paid the same and so on. would we all be millionaires?
This is going to be a controversial problem, mainly because it’s difficult to define “wealth” in a general way. There’s obviously more to it than “each person got paid the same and so on;”.
Nevertheless, this site claims world wealth–I believe as measured in financial assets–was $30.8 trillion in 2004. Divide that by the world population of about 6.4 billion in the same year, and that’s roughly $4,800 for every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth.
On the other hand, this site has a chart stating total net worth of the US to be about $42.4 trillion; divide that by 300 million americans, and we could each take a $141,000 slice.
You tell me how to reconcile these numbers; is the rest of the world really that poor, or is non-financial wealth really that big a slice of US assets? Personally, there’s no way I’d–errrr–take any of this information to the bank. There’s just too many ways to geek the numbers to insure we could derive a fair answer.
It seems to me that wealth by its very nature depends on inequality. If I own a townhouse on Fifth Avenue, its value is due the fact that many people want it, but few can afford it. If buying power were to be suddenly redistributed ‘equally’, the value of that townhouse would change dramatically, thus changing the basis on which the redistribution was done in the first place.
You can also look at people like bill Gates. In some years, his net worth increases many billions. However, that is largely tied up in Microsoft stock. He can’t actually sell a huge amount of it at one time because that would cause the stock itself to crash.
Therefore, if you took$30 billion of Bill Gates Miscosoft stock (or any company really) and redistributed to others and they sold it to claim the money, the rapid liquidation would make it worth many times less than that.
That figure has got to be waaaaaaaaaaaay low. The CIA World Factbook estimates the gross world product for 2004 to be about $55 trillion dollars. That would be a per capita annual income of $8,800 per person.