Thousand-dollar diarrhea

56 hours ago I awoke with terrible stomach pains and over the remaining hours of the night vomited three times. In-between vomiting I was kept from sleep by cramps which progressed to diarrhea with accompanying exhaustion, and with each passing minute I saw my hopes of going to work fade. When day broke I finally slept. For the next 24 hours I would be intermittently awoken by the dire urge to go to the bathroom, after which I would sip on gatorade before drifting back to an uneasy slumber.

During this time I missed my most productive workday of the week, wherein, because I start at 7:30AM and often work until midnight plus or minus a few hours more for a delivery, I might earn up to $1000.

Which leads me, 56 hours later and with stomach cramps slowly subsiding, to reflect on where I stand in the global scale of wealth.

Let's say that I worked 100 of these 24-hour clinic+call shifts for $100,000 a year. According to Global Rich List, such an income puts me in the top 0.66% of earners worldwide. If I earned a tenth of that—$10,000 a year—I would still be in the top 13%, with 87% of the world's population earning less. Even at $1000 a year—the amount I missed in a day's work because of a GI bug—I would be in the top 44%, meaning that greater than half of the world survives on less, which is less than $3 a day.

One limitation of this website is that it doesn't delineate the breakdown of salaries greater than $200,000. This might not seem to matter, except that in this tiny fraction of people most of the wealth is concentrated, and the further to the right of the wealth-vs.-number-of-people graph one goes, the steeper the curve.

A site which gives a better idea of this graph, which looks like a reverse letter "L", is called just that: The L-Curve. The L-curve site focuses on America alone. Since America has a median income of $40,000, it's like taking the final three person icons on the Global Richlist site (the top 3% of all earners) and expanding them in detail. The results are shocking.

If income is stacks of $100 bills, America's median of $40,000 is a stack 1.6 inches high. For an income of $100,000, the stack is 4 inches high; for $1 million it is 40 inches high. $1M is reached at "one foot from the goal line"; population is plotted along a football field with the median income at the 50-yard line. One has to zoom out to appreciate the full scale. At $1 billion worth of income, the stack is 1km high. Using what it says was an estimate of Bill Gates's greatest increase in net worth in 1 year of $50 billion, the final stack of bills is 50 kilometers high.

I went to Forbes.com to confirm this. While wealth is not equal to income, the spread is the same. As of 2010:

-There are 1,011 billionaires

-The richest 51 billionaires control over $1 trillion dollars

-The world's 3 richest men control assets greater than the combined GDP of the world's 71 poorest countries (using CIA - The World Factbook, 2009)

-If one of these men lost money because of diarrhea in commensurate fashion to my 2-day loss, that bathroom break would cost him...one billion dollars.

Unsettling, to say the least.

So. Clearly we non-billionaires don't at this time have the power that money commands. On the other hand, there are 1000 of them, and more than 6 billion of us. I cannot help but think of the Jimi Hendrix quote, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Such are the reflections of an unquiet stomach, which as I write is quieter already.