Logarithmic Wealth

I am wondering if wealth is really logarithmic in a way. Wealth (income as well as owned) spans so many scales (6 to 9 order of magnitude, see below), that I it seems to lose its meaning if you go to other scales. For example, the problems of joe public concerning his income simply do not apply to the really rich or the really poor ones.

From MakeTheClientPay:

May I ask a question that is not directly related to the aspects discussed so far? Yes, thanks. If this concept was adopted in general, wouldn't this immediately mean that rich clients get better service than poor ones? And with our society having at least 6 orders of magnitude in income, wouldn't that put the poor quickly below the ability to use the net for anything useful? Can this concern be addressed? -- GunnarZarncke

No, because you're not making clients pay in money, only in computing power. And computing power only has a spread of 2 or 3 orders of magnitude at best. And income has a spread of 9 orders of magnitude, not 6. You forgot to count the third world. -- RK

If you look at the disparity in money, you can look at several things;

• revenue, which is not useful by any measure
• income, which means net income
• wealth, net of course

If we look at net wealth, Bill Gates has on the order of 10 billion USD, whereas a substantial fraction of Americans have zero and negative net wealth. So the disparity in net wealth varies between 14 orders of magnitude; yes, some people are in hock to the tune of tens of thousands. Or just 12 orders of magnitude if you exclude extraordinary cases.

If you look at net income, it's much the same thing. Wealth on the order of 10s of billions produces on the order of billions a year in income. Whereas the starving poor in the third world are actually losing capital every day, from their own bodies no less since you can put a dollar figure to starvation (let's be conservative and stick to the price of alleviating it). In that case, starving people in the third world lose on the order of hundreds of USD each year. This gives 11 orders of magnitude, or 8 orders if we exclude the extraordinary cases (people who just barely avoid starving by sinking all of their revenue into food and housing).

The existence of the zero and negative values makes the entire scale artificial (if you convert to yen, the orders of magnitude multiply) but these values by themselves prove that the income / wealth disparities are screwed up beyond mere disparity. Even 8 orders of magnitude makes user fees (money payments) a poor method of eliminating spurious demands for medical services. If it weren't for capitalism, user fees would be a fantastic idea.

The difference between a 386 (3 MIPS) and an overclocked AMD Athlon (25,000 MIPS) is only 4 orders of magnitude. Realistically, everyone's got a minimum of 300 MIPS these days so the difference is only 2 orders of magnitude. -- RK

I essentially agree. I pulled the figure 6 just to illustrate, not as an exact/qualified number. As for the processing power: Just take more PCs. -- .gz