I was wondering what the monitary value of the earth is if you wanted to buy it lock, stock, and barrel. I was reading the tort reform thread where people were talking about giving high damage settlements to charity or the government and it occurred to me, as it often does, that one of the reasons that people sue is because they want the money and one of the reasons they want the money is that economic concerns, not having money is scarry since everything about our society revolves around money. Well that led me to think about something I also often think about and that is, what would life be like if we invested some fraction of our wealth annually, say in the stock market for starters, for our children. Now this investment won't be able to be touched for maybe numerous generations till there's a pot big enough to pay say our great great grand kids a living wage maybe when they are old.
But we could keep investing and eventually maybe their great great grand kids would have a pot so big they could retire when they were born. Well naturally you would have to invest in stuff like the stock market, but maybe we're talking sums here bigger than the total value of the market in which case maybe we would have to start buying other countries markets and eventually other countries and antiques and art and eventually the fund would own everything on earth. So that got me to thinking how much it would cost to own everything and if it's enough for everybody to retire. We could always buy the moon and mars and the asteroids too, for that matter and space colonies. There's not much end in sight to the additional value we could produce with that kind of wealth.
Well naturally that kind of makes you wonder what the earth is worth in today's market. Instead of a tax cut or dividend tax reduction to fuel the economy, I was wondering what would happen if you just gave everybody their share now if maybe the economy wouldn't take off like a shot. One easy way, just as a possibility to get some sense of value, would be to ask people what it's worth to them to be on earth as opposed to say being sent to Mars. Since there's no oxigen there I would suspect it's a lot. And since we're talking 'market value' here naturally we'd want to ask Bill Gates what he'd pay to stay on Earth. That would give us some notion of the value of life here and we could just give everybody on earth that much. That kind of inflow of capital all over the world ought to stimulate the economy tremendously.
Maybe that last part won't work, but if, over time, we bought everything, how much do you suppose that investment would yield annually?
But we could keep investing and eventually maybe their great great grand kids would have a pot so big they could retire when they were born. Well naturally you would have to invest in stuff like the stock market, but maybe we're talking sums here bigger than the total value of the market in which case maybe we would have to start buying other countries markets and eventually other countries and antiques and art and eventually the fund would own everything on earth. So that got me to thinking how much it would cost to own everything and if it's enough for everybody to retire. We could always buy the moon and mars and the asteroids too, for that matter and space colonies. There's not much end in sight to the additional value we could produce with that kind of wealth.
Well naturally that kind of makes you wonder what the earth is worth in today's market. Instead of a tax cut or dividend tax reduction to fuel the economy, I was wondering what would happen if you just gave everybody their share now if maybe the economy wouldn't take off like a shot. One easy way, just as a possibility to get some sense of value, would be to ask people what it's worth to them to be on earth as opposed to say being sent to Mars. Since there's no oxigen there I would suspect it's a lot. And since we're talking 'market value' here naturally we'd want to ask Bill Gates what he'd pay to stay on Earth. That would give us some notion of the value of life here and we could just give everybody on earth that much. That kind of inflow of capital all over the world ought to stimulate the economy tremendously.
Maybe that last part won't work, but if, over time, we bought everything, how much do you suppose that investment would yield annually?
Facebook
Twitter