Seconds to Years, or Our Crazy Wealth Disparity

The math doesn’t feel right, but it is

There are about 1,000,000 seconds in 12 days. What seems impossible for humans to comprehend is how much more 1 billion seconds is compared to 1 million. Go ahead, try to think about how many more days it is than 12. Did you think of a number? One billion seconds is around 32 years—32 years—so much larger that on the surface, the math doesn’t feel like it should make sense or be true. But it is true.

I was talking with some family the other day on a long drive about how being a millionaire was the mark of the easy life when we grew up. Having a few million made you ultra-rich. It was the dream of all monetary dreams. The difference in our world today is the growing number of billionaires. The disparity between them and the rest of the world is almost incomprehensible. It will also lead us to problems as a society if we don’t get this figured out. The uneven spread of wealth from the top to the bottom has never been larger.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon (in 2024) is worth over $209 billion. As of September 2024, the average annual salary for an Amazon employee in the United States is $74,619, or about $35.87 per hour. However, the range of salaries is wide, with many employees making as little as $11,000. The few higher-paid employees at the top skew that higher number. Most Amazon employees make between $46,500 and $91,500, with the top 10% of earners making $150,000 or more.

Let’s take the average. How long would an employee need to work to make Jeff Bezos's net worth, assuming they don’t spend a dime? To be fair, we are also assuming they are not investing their salary. We want to see how much Mr. Bezos relies on this pay disparity to make his own massive wealth.

To calculate how many years it would take to make $209 billion at an annual salary of $74,619, we can divide the total amount by the yearly salary:

It would take approximately 2.8 million years to make $209 billion at a salary of $74,619 per year.

About 2.8 million years ago, Earth was in the Pliocene Epoch. This would have been part of the Neogene Period and lasted from about 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago. It was a time of cooler, drying climates, which led to the expansion of grasslands and the evolution of many grazing animals. This was a time before modern humans (Homo sapiens) but within the time when early human ancestors (hominins) were evolving. During the Pliocene, hominins like Australopithecus were walking upright, but they were quite different from modern humans. They are considered early ancestors in the human evolutionary tree, but they didn’t have the same advanced tool use, culture, or cognitive abilities we associate with Homo sapiens today. The species Homo habilis, often considered one of the earliest members of the genus Homo and closer to what we would consider "human" today, first appeared around 2.4 million years ago, shortly after the end of the Pliocene and into the early Pleistocene Epoch. This makes the time 2.8 million years ago a pivotal period in our evolutionary history, but still before "humans" as we know them had emerged.

The concept for Homo habilis of what $74,619 would have meant would have most probably been way out of the cognitive understanding. Let alone the assignment to work for that amount for the next 2.8 million years.

I recently read that we are only a few years away from having trillionaires in our country. I will not mention the names of the people who are that close but I’m sure you know who they are. So that you understand the nature of this, let's go back to my first point, comparing these numbers to seconds.

One trillion seconds is 31,388.09 years.