For a time, Michael Bloomberg was considered a possible Democratic nominee for the 2020 United States presidential election, largely because he could spend a lot of his personal fortune on advertisements.
His net worth is $54.9 billion, according to Forbes magazine. Ten years ago, it was $18 billion. Forbes awards him a Self-Made Score of 8 (the highest possible is 10) and a Philanthropy Score of 5 (the maximum).
So, let’s do some math. Define a “Bloomberg-minute” as the amount of money he has made on average per minute (day or night) during the past 10 years. That’s about $7,000.
To put it another way, if his income for 10 years had come simply by picking up a $100 bill every second of his life, without sleeping, he would have become less wealthy.
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During the primary campaign, Bloomberg finally embraced the proposal of a minimum wage of $15 an hour that he had opposed for many years. A person working 50 hours a week for 52 weeks at $15 an hour will earn about $40,000 in a year, less than six Bloomberg-minutes. Many “essential workers” are paid substantially less.
“Out of Reach, 2020” is a report recently published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It indicates that, for example, to spend no more that 30% of their salary on a standard two-bedroom apartment, an Oregonian needs to be paid, on average, $24.37 per hour (more than twice the minimum wage in our state).
Bloomberg’s campaign failed, largely due to attention being drawn to his misogyny and to his law-and-order policies while mayor of New York. His wealth and how he got it were a relatively minor issue, though Bernie Sanders did assert that the presidency should not, and could not, be bought.
Now ponder some of the words used above:
Net worth: By any reasonable definition, I am rich, though people like Bloomberg would not call me that. But what am I worth? Pardon my arrogance, but like anyone else with total assets of less than a million dollars, I consider myself worth more than 0.00002 Michael Bloombergs.
Earn: What does it mean to “earn” $7,000 a minute (day or night, remember)? Does not the word imply that the amount is, in some sense, merited? What is it that could be so valuable to society? Paul Krugman, in his Feb. 21 column in The New York Times, “Warren, Bloomberg and What Really Matters,” stated that Bloomberg has not engaged directly in destructive wheeler-dealing, but that he succeeded “by selling equipment to destructive wheeler-dealers.” In other words, he accrued a great amount of money by helping others accrue great amounts of money without doing or creating anything of value to other people.
Essential worker: This is a term the pandemic has brought to the forefront of public awareness. By way of examples, the average annual pay for a grocery checkout operator in Portland is about $35,000, or five Bloomberg-minutes, while that for a nurse is about 10 Bloomberg-minutes.
Self-made: Forbes uses “self-made” as a term of art to mean a person who becomes rich without inheriting a large amount of money. Otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever. That I have enjoyed a comfortable life is due to others, especially my family, community and teachers, and growing up in a society, namely the United Kingdom after the Second World War, enjoying significant elements of democratic socialism, including totally free education and the National Health Service.
Philanthropist: To be awarded the top Philanthropy Score by Forbes, a person must have donated either a billion dollars, or 20% of their net worth. I like the definition of “philanthropist” in the Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: “A rich ... old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.” As argued in “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists” by Robert Noonan, the really generous people are the workers who give their labor cheaply for the profit of others. Eugene Debs, as cited in the Devil’s Dictionary, defined “riches” as “the savings of many in the hands of one.”
My anger is not primarily directed against Michael Bloomberg as an individual. Rather, it is against the system to which he is so perfectly adapted. Analyzing that system, Thomas Piketty’s recent book “Capital and Ideology” is over a thousand pages long, but the essential message can be expressed in a few sentences: The amount of money a person controls is not determined by God-given or natural rules. Rather, it is the result of ideologically driven societal decisions that we, the people, could collectively decide to change. Effective mechanisms to address extremes of wealth and income inequality are available and not complicated, and the only revolution that is required is for people to vote in their own interests. In short, it does not have to be like this.
As someone who has worked on school mathematics education for about 40 years, I ask: Why are such stark realities apparently not clear to honest people working hard at essential jobs to earn $40,000 or less per year?
If the hundreds of hours learning mathematics at school do not result in such a basic political awareness, then of what good is mathematics education?