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I received some blowback from Friday's column, where I celebrated the record number of ultra-rich people in the world. Some folks sincerely believe that we live in a zero-sum world, where the only way one person has more is if someone else has less. If that were true, national incomes, national household net wealth and our national GDP would not keep increasing, as they have now for over a century. Here's a thought experiment for people upset by economic inequality... Imagine if everyone in the United States were suddenly given a million dollars, every single person. Even the homeless. There would be no poor. No middle class. Everyone's essential needs would be met. Yet we have still done absolutely nothing about wealth concentration and economic inequality. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk still have hundreds of billions of dollars more than everyone else. And that's not fair! Of course, no one – least of all the government (which has zero money aside from what it extracts from individuals and businesses with an implied threat of force) – is going to give everyone a million dollars. (That's why it's a thought experiment, not a new policy proposal from AOC.) But I have good news for you... Reach into your pocket. If there's a smartphone in there, you're a multimillionaire. I mean this literally. Smartphone ownership is nearly universal in the United States. That slab of glass you use to doom scroll social media and order DoorDash would have cost millions of dollars to assemble just a few decades ago. And parts of it couldn't have been bought at any price, by anyone, including the richest man on the planet. Yet we've gotten so used to the miracle that we get irritated when it buffers and we have to look at the spinning wheel for a few seconds. In 1985, the most powerful computer on Earth was the Cray-2. It was a bench-shaped machine submerged in liquid coolant, and it cost around $17 million. It was not for sale to you, however. It went to nuclear weapons labs, defense agencies, and a handful of elite research institutions. A decade later, in 1997, a machine called ASCI Red became the first computer ever to break one trillion calculations per second. It cost about $55 million, sprawled across roughly 1,600 square feet – the footprint of a good-sized house – and again, it existed to simulate nuclear explosions, not to fit in your jeans. Today your phone laughs at both of them. The chip inside a current iPhone or Android flagship blows past a trillion operations per second without breaking a sweat, sips battery power for a full day, and rides around in your back pocket. The single most powerful machine on the planet in 1997, a $55 million national asset reserved for a superpower's weapons program, is now the thing you use to argue with strangers and identify songs in a coffee shop. That alone – just the raw computing – is millions of dollars of capability. But your phone is only just getting started. |
