X-Message-Number: 23183
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 01:12:26 +0100
Subject: Re: Read books
From: David Stodolsky <>

On Saturday, December 27, 2003, at 12:24  PM, John de Rivaz wrote:

>> Subject: Re: Read books
>> From: David Stodolsky <>
> <del>
>> A more equitable distribution of incomes would
>> expand the market for cryonics by probably much more than a factor of
>> five.
> <del>
>
> If the wealth of the world was concentrated by a world government, and  
> then
> distributed equally amongst everyone, what would each person have,  
> after
> deducting estimated costs of policing and enforcing the operation?

According to the 1995 CIA Factbook the average World per capita income  
was $5,200:

<http://www.immigration-usa.com/wfb/1995/rankings/ 
per_capita_gdp_gnp_1.html>


World military expenditures are in the range of a trillion a year, and  
with a world government these could be dropped. This would boost  
incomes.



Given that there are a couple of billion people with incomes under a  
couple of dollars a day, there is little doubt that a redistribution of  
wealth would expand the market for cryonics.


http://specials.ft.com/worldeconomy2000/FT31MFCQBDC.html

Worldwide, the total population living on less than $1 a day has risen  
from 1.2bn in 1987 to around 1.5bn today, and if recent trends  
persists, it will reach 1.9bn by 2015.


http://www.dse.de/ef/poverty/bourgign.htm

3. Two-way causality: relative poverty is inefficient and may cause  
absolute poverty
  An important contribution of the recent economic literature has been  
to show that poverty and distribution issues were not pure  
distributional problems, that is the problem of how to divide a cake of  
given size. There are many reasons to believe that, on the contrary,  
the size of the cake depends precisely on the way it is divided in  
society.  This implies that a society with little relative poverty and  
social exclusion could be more efficient and therefore more able to  
avoid absolute poverty than a more inegalitarian society.  I shall give  
in what follows three examples of economic mechanisms which may lie  
behind such a relationship. Two of them also provide illustrations of  
dynamic poverty traps of the type discussed above. 



dss


David S. Stodolsky    SpamTo: 

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=23183