Post #29: Most Billionaires Aren't Meaningful
Here’s an analysis on the top 2,500 billionaires from 2022.
It turns out that only 30% of the wealth held by billionaires represents a meaningful contribution to society when using the below three “goals” to define meaning:
Increase the healthspan of all organisms- including Earth, other planetary systems, star systems, and currently unknown life systems
Spread life’s awareness throughout existence to the point where there are no unknowns and we, life, have a complete understanding of our reality
Ensure the peaceful coexistence of all life so that we can collaborate towards achieving the first two goals
Then, instead of using those three goals above that I came up with, I used the 17 UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) to see how much of the wealth aligns with those. It turns out that 80% of the wealth aligns with the SDGs. You might say that 80% is great, but that still means that 20% of the wealth accrued by these people didn’t require a meaningful contribution, which could be the difference between our civilization succeeding or failing.
Here’s the original file I used for this analysis and below that is the transcript.
Here’s the chatgpt transcript of the analysis.
While this analysis suffers from a lack of rigour on a few fronts, it provides some food for thought. If the world’s richest people are accruing wealth without contributing meaningful value, what are they doing?
And more importantly, how can we update our systems to ensure that when a person generates wealth they are also contributing to civilization in a meaningful way?