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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Siddhartha Gautama who wrote (23755)	10/22/2009 8:54:47 PM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	2 Recommendations Respond to of 71407

isn't it more useful to chart and look into per capita human wealth growth instead of human wealth growth? the post you are referencing was really about the magic of compounding numbers, and putting them in context in relation to economic growth throughout human history. $2.03 in the year 650, compounding at 3 percent till now, is $568 QUADRILLION. this figure is much greater than the world's "net worth" today, as it is some 10,000 times current world GDP. (let's say world "net worth" is 10x income, so if world GDP is $56 trillion or whatever, world "net worth" would be like $560 trillion, still less than 1/1000 the value of the abovementioned supercompounding $2.03.) since the "net worth" of the world in the year 650 A.D. was presumably greater than $2.03 in 2009 dollars, it follows that the compound growth rate of world "net worth" is much, much smaller than 3 percent. for a discussion of per capita growth, see the post below (especially the chart) and others i have put up here over the past day or two. Message 26040581 the upshot of all this is we humans are fooling ourselves by considering it normal for human wealth to compound at 2-3% real. we just happened to be born in a narrow phase of human history when we hit the productivity jackpot thanks to fossil fuels.