Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Ok this is my brain going on a random thought carnival this morning and the very reason that this blog is called Esoteric Meanderings.

So here goes… Everyone that watched the Avengers movies know what I am talking about and for those that don’t the villain Thanos at the end of Infinity Wars having secured all the magical infinity stone snapped his fingers and ½ of all living things in the universe disappeared. His goal was to return balance to a system that was and out of balance.

My thinking is, was removing ½ of all living things really going to bring balance, wouldn’t removing prejudice and creating economic equality level the imbalance rather than a 50% reduction in population. I suppose that would not make a good verse evil story if the villain wanted to end poverty by making the super-rich just rich and reducing or removing hunger and poverty. Man, that wouldn’t be a compelling story line.

As of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion. The World Population in 2023 is 8,045,311,447. Let’s do the math… that is 0.000000091357557% of the global population. The global wealth as of 2023 was $454.4 trillion, that math isn’t too difficult 735 families possess nearly 10% of the global wealth. Seems to me that there is a real imbalance in those figures.

Ending world hunger would require significant financial resources. According to estimates from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an annual investment of around $267 billion is needed to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030. Let’s but this number in relation to the amount Elon Musk spent to buy, and is now destroying Twitter, Musk the arrogant South African bought Twitter for $44 billion and that had no impact on his wealth. He willy nilly spent 15% of the funds that could help to end world hunger. It would cost the wealthiest families 0.0006145% of their combined wealth to end world hunger. That is a miniscule amount that they would even notice is missing, that seems like more of an imbalance than just too many living things.

I don’t know how to solve the inequity problem; I know it can’t be done by any one individual or even one government because the unfortunate truth is that those with the money will always have the power to hold on to it. The problem we have and have always had is that a very few always consolidate things, money, land, power, and with those things they manipulate influence in order to confound the masses into believing that they aren’t worthy partaking in the bounty those few hold.

I wish I could Thanos Snap and level the field, there will always be rich and poor but if the super wealthy were just less wealthy and the poor were less poor maybe just maybe the imbalance would only be a river instead of an ocean.

Thanks for suffering through my musing… feel free to interject what your Thanos Snap would be.