My share of the Earth. If the total amount of arable land is 5.34 million square miles & the total population is 8 billion, then each person's individual portion is 1/1500 of a square mile, or 136 feet on a side. That's a little bigger than the average house lot (18496 sq ft vs 13896). (Not that it would really be feasible for one person to farm that size lot & live only on what they grew.) If the world GNP is $146 trillion, then each person's share is $18,250, or $50 a day. But note that this is a snapshot of an ongoing process, there are a lot of non-liquid assets (such as the instruments of production); plus a large portion of the world's wealth is devoted to keeping things separate, as much as maintaining lines of passage (transportation & communication, both highly wasteful in our present dispensation). That is to say, the world economy is a structure of both walls & gates. I can imagine that removing walls & gates would free up a lot of wealth... What is the point of such utopian calculations? Maybe only to suggest that the problem is not that the world is poor: its wealth is unevenly distributed.
Closing Hours. (via neon city burning on tumblr)
"Why pretexts seekest thou, and bandiest
Thy bootless bickerings?" --Mooney's Hosidius Geta
"The chief interest of the piece is in the proof it supplies of the popular knowledge of the text of Virgil at that time; it also illustrates the utter want of true poetical feeling which could make such an undertaking possible." More cento links (some may be broken).
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