Billions and billions

7.13 Billion. That is the current number of human inhabitants on the earth. It's a staggering number and a little hard to get your head around. Each person, every one of you, is 0.000000014% of the total population. Isn't that nuts? There are so many people that if you were to spend just one second at a time in the lives of each and every one of us, it would take 226 years. According to Wolfram Alpha, the average age on earth is 27.6 years. What this means is that on earth, right now, there is 196.8 billion years of human life experience. This is fourteen times the accepted age of the universe, which is only 13.8 billion. Let that sink in.

In the United States, the population is 319 million. The GDP of the United States is 16.91 trillion. This means that, per person, the total average value produced per year in this country is $53,009. This only gets crazier when you realize that this number is counting all residents, not just those working. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the labor force in the United States is right around 155 million. This means that each laborer in this country contributes an average of $109,000 to our economy. Now, there are two things I can do with this number.

The first and most obvious is to point out that if, like 96% of the working population, you make less than $109,000 per year, this is because the 4% who is making more than that, is making a lot more. This is what people talk about when speaking of income inequality. It's gotten a bit ridiculous. But there's also a lot of people talking about it, so I'm going to talk about something else.

Remember that population of the earth? 7.13 billion. 7,130,000,000. It's a lot. And remember the total GDP of the USA divided by its population? $53,009. Not bad. I wonder what would happen if you took the collective GDP of the entire planet and divided it by its population? Let's find out.

Again, according to Wolfram Alpha, the GDP of the entire planet is roughly $71.92 trillion. Seems like a lot. Divided by the total number of inhabitants, though, it's only $10,087 per person. Try to remember that all of those dollars are resources. We take resources from the earth and convert them to value, and that's essentially what an economy is. In the United States, each person is roughly entitled to five times the average of the rest of the world. And some countries are far below average. Just something to think about.