Moving to: m/AskMbin!

This is a great point, and the same logic applies to someone who's destitute vs someone with the median net worth of about $100,000.

See this is where you failed logarithms. Let's talk domestic and then we'll move on to developing world. To explain it a bit better here's a breakdown. Let's say I take all my net worth and sell it. Lock, stock, and barrel. Convert it to cash and then take 50% of that dollar amount and hand it to someone. That value will allow a single person to have an apartment, furnish it, and pay rent for about 48 months. Now take the same billionaire and put it towards that same person. That 50% of that dollar amount is 43 times more money than if you completely liquidated the entire town of 12,000 in middle of nowhere Tennessee I live in. The billionaire could purchase forty-three of my towns. I can grant someone an apartment for maybe four years.

It's all the same 50%, but because of MATH, it's wildly different in what is possible with that same 50%. That's the "great point" you should be walking away with. Logarithms and orders of magnitude are wild things!

Now let's move to international. Minus the whole point I just made, one would think, oh if I give some money overseas, they'll be able to go to Walmart and grab some rice. Well they don't have Walmart. If I gave them $50k it is about as worth $0 because there's nowhere for the money to go that'll directly help them. It's not till I give them enough money to actually build the Walmart (or whatever shopping center, or you can call the Walmart farming equipment, or access to seed and fertilizer, or whatever basically enough money to grant them access to a resource that is just removed completely from them).

That's the thing people forget about abject destitution. They are so poor and exist in an environment that is so resource poor, handing them $100,000 might help keep them warm at night by burning the cash. But they are SO poor, you need a massive injection of funds to literally kick start their economy, and surprise $100,000, a quarter million, or half a million ain't going to cut it. You need nine figures to even get started and that massively ignores the complexities of the geopolitics and the fun details of despotism. But I side step all of that for simple fact that we just need to keep this to math and what I had previously indicated.

The economy is mostly based around the buying power of the median. So every log₁₀ past that point means massive change.

A developing nation's economy is in 1e-n territory for the median buying power relative to the US dollar. So for large n, you need large positive exponents to compensate. If some economy relative to the US dollar is 1e-6 for purchase power, then me sending 1e5 in funds is still fractional buying power on the order of like 0.1 relative to the dollar.

to feed a bunch of people in the developing world and it wouldn't ruin their life

The feeding you have to remember is someone here in the US buying the food and then sending the food. We buy the food at US prices, so it'll feed at the same rate it feeds a US mouth, because we didn't buy it at developing world nation price, we bought it at US price. We buy the food in the US because those nations are so poor, they do not even have food to buy for them to eat, you have to bring all the money required to invent all of that there.

So like I said, that whole 50% means vastly different things in terms of different log base. It's all the same 50%, yes, but it's wildly different values.