Why Won’t Jeff Bezos End World Hunger?
The ultra-rich keep fooling us with the same trick.
Last year I, along with roughly 104,000 other people all seemingly simultaneously discovered a new Twitter account that asked a very simple question: Has Jeff Bezos Decided to End World Hunger Today?
The premise of the account centers around 2 connected concepts: 1. according to the IFPRI (Internation Food Policy Research Institute), it would cost $11 Billion to end world hunger per year and 2. Jeff Bezos is currently worth $184 Billion (give or take a couple million on any given day based on how Amazon stock is doing).
In short: Jeff Bezos could end world hunger for the next 15 years and still be worth roughly $14 Billion, or if you prefer, still be the 76th richest person alive.
Arguments about the veracity of these claims or Bezos’ liquidity at any given point in time aside, it is a staggering quantification of the kind of change truly incomprehensible wealth could potentially be capable of.
The human mind has difficulty conceptualizing large numbers. Scientists and sociologists generally hold that the largest number a human brain can realistically comprehend in meaningful terms is around 100,000, with estimates ranging as low as a couple hundred, all the way up to perhaps one million…
