Understanding Wealth Inequity

I was watching a poker match between Mr. Beast and Moist Critical’s Charlie with the stacks of 100,000$. Neither of these individuals are what you’d consider poker players in any capacity, just the kind of casual player that do it for fun. Mr. Beast is one of the most subscribed Youtube content creators with a channel that is mostly built around unique challenges that offer significant cash prizes. It’s very creative, but could be boiled down into, “Would you do or try x for the chance of winning x.”

Charlie is himself another famous Youtuber, a modern age bard slapping poetic prose to the shitty culture in the world. He also is generally into video games, twitch, and spending obscene amounts of money on collectable card games.

The poker match they had, representing $50,000 of each players money didn’t mean anything to either of these players. It wasn’t about winning or losing this money, it was about the content of creating a video and playing a poker tournament for these stakes. In a way it was so both of these individuals could make more content and from that content more money, branding, and so forth. Also just to have fun and I assume kind of for the fuck of it.

And given the title of this essay you’d think this is where I spend paragraphs talking about how these people represent the problems with our world, but they don’t. I like both of their content and see it as inherently more meaningful, as inherently something contributing more to our society, than most multi-million dollar companies and all billionaires.

The reason being these two content creators actually give back. Mr. Beast is essentially a sentient lottery machine channeling the wealth of his content and channel back into some of the people who watch it — give the folks who win some meaningful economic boon to have for just a second some security they may never have had before. He gave a girl $100,000 dollars to not drop out of high school. He routinely sets up his content in such a way that he wants the people he interacts with to win. He is redistributing wealth in a way that is both creating content to ease the stress of someone’s life, but also it actually goes back into these communities — unlike companies who aren’t paying taxes. Beyond his content, he’s also donating a significant amount of this money to charities or finding ways for this to happen.

Charlie isn’t as large as Mr. Beast and likely couldn’t afford that same level of contribution, but that isn’t his content either. He’s mostly just being himself, being authentic, and to the most part encouraging this in others. He spends tens of thousands of dollars on collectable card games, but to look at that as wasteful spending, to ask how much that could stretch to house people or feed homeless is such a red herring. Charlie isn’t rich in any sense of this word and to a point we should be allowed to spend money on the pursuits we want. Charlie doesn’t represent wealth inequality by being a person or part of a company that generates wealth.

However, when watching their tournament, Mr. Beast casually picks up $200 dollars in cash and told Charlie that this wad of cash was the representation of each chip they played with and this got me thinking about how we frame wages and wealth in America. We fight over the debate of minimum wage needing to be raised to $15 dollars an hour for honestly the entirety of my adult life. And let’s look at the easy math:

Minimum wage $7.25 x 8 hours= $58
Common wage $10.00 x 8 hours = $80
Increased minimum $15 x 8 hours = $120

Here is the thing, this “debate” has been happening since long before I was born and I’m not going to be adding anything new here. However, when we focus on this debate we often get into how much someone makes per week, per month, per year, or look at how much to afford a 2 bedroom place to live and I think this may be a mistake. I think when we look outside of the value of one eight hour shift, we start to miss a lot of important details about exactly what this means intrinsically.

Before we go further, to explain the three wages, the minimum wage is the federal minimum wage and by definition is the lowest a person can be paid. Arguments are made that nobody makes this anyways so let’s just ignore it for 20 years and yeah we basically did. However, this wage is more common to individuals in economically disparaged areas who don’t have any real choice for where they work. It is the wage they use for new Americans, single moms, or in poor communities. This federal minimum is still applied to many many people within the United States.

Common wage represents that many people do make more than the minimum wage and this typically is around the $10 dollar range, while the $15 dollar range is more obviously what many people are fighting for and have been fighting for so long inflation indicates $15 dollars is less valuable than $7.25 was when that was instated.

Regardless, looking back at the 200 dollars in cash that represents each chip in their friendly poker game, we see that each chip is worth more than 8 hours of labor from anyone making $15 dollars or less. Almost twice as much actually and that’s kind of insane.

When we describe an 8 hour day, we also have to look at the time it takes to get ready for work — showering, laundry, commute, and other various responsibilities we must maintain outside of our working time. Often many jobs will give you an unpaid 30 minute lunch break, meaning that you’ll spend at minimum 8.5 hours on the job. Between getting there, working there, leaving, and decompressing after work than you’re likely to spend 10 hours of your time in a day for a job. This effectively makes minimum wage closer to $5.80 for the time you lose participating in the job.

Many of these jobs that pay very low wages are very physically demanding. Looking at fast food, this is work that requires standing for eight hours, usually in high heat environments, while having to suffer emotional abuse from customers. It could eight hours of standing, organizing clothes, and dealing with emotional abuse from customers. It could be eight hours of answering the phone, while dealing with emotional abuse from customers. If you currently make significantly more than $15 dollars an hour, can you honestly say that is worth your time? That for 10 hours of your life, you’ll get 58 dollars in return? That for 50 hours of your life in a week, you’ll get $290 dollars or slightly more than a single poker chip in this poker game of the affluent? When we look at it within this context, each chip they have in this friendly game of poker represents approximately 50 hours of life.

My first job was making pizzas for $6 dollars an hour, 35 hours a week, and about $800 a month. The job was exhausting and demanding and we often got yelled at for not being better. I now give professional training and speaking opportunities that pay $100 or more per hour. If it’s a larger conference I can expect to make $1,000 for 2 hours of my time. While I spend a decade learning material to make me one of the very few experts in my state on the topic I cover, it seems so insane to me that I can talk for two hours and make more than I did in an entire month working my ass off in a kitchen.

So, let’s do this instead. Let’s not look at minimum wage as the amount of money you get per hour, let us look at it as the amount of life it represents. $7.25 equals one hour of life. In that conference I mentioned earlier, I earned 69 hours of life per hour of work(nice).

A single person, working minimum wage, earns one hour of life per hour they work. Jeff Bozos’ net worth is equal to about 27 billion hours of life. And you may think this is an absurd way to look at it, but think about it the other way. Jeff Bozos could hire individuals at minimum wage and take 27 billion hours of their life away doing work for him. Each poker chip could buy 27 hours of someone’s life at minimum wage to do whatever they wanted. Mr. Beast could pay someone $15 an hour and by cashing in a single chip in that game, buy 13 hours of that person’s life.

But Faye, that’s a bit insane, in America we have a choice. WE. HAVE. FREEDOM. Except, where can we live for free? What food can we eat for free? What healthcare do we have access to for free? What equality of life we have outside of the society that barters money for life? The ability to be Walden’s Henry David Theraou doesn’t reasonably exist. It is not a real counter argument, it is just a person being an antagonistic ass.

So, let’s look back at rent. I think a 2 bedroom price point is kind of dumb. Why would a single person need a 2 bedroom? However, let’s just say a one bedroom is $600 a month. That’s pretty reasonable, obviously that’ll change depending on landscape, but assuming wages are near $10.00 per hour of your life, that is what you’re going to find. Given our new model of looking at this, that means rent is 82 hours of your life. However, that’s only in consider of the $7.25 you’re getting paid for to work. I already establish it is much more likely you’re putting in 10 hours a day per 8 hour shift, so that’s actually 103 hours of your life to live in a shelter. That’s rent, that doesn’t go anywhere. For 103 hours of your life, you only get to continue to live in shelter.

You have to eat and prices can very, but let’s say another 30–40 hours of your life to eat. You probably have to have some fun at some point or why are we alive? But that could cost another few dozen hours of your life to buy concert tickets or a gaming counsel so who knows?

Let’s get into the real question here, how many hours of your life do you get to save each month in case of emergency? It isn’t hard to walk way from a clinic with a bill that costs about 200 hours of your life. In fact research showed that to get out of poverty, a person needed approximately 20 continues years with no medical issues.

And one could argue that when someone is in poverty they have a number of economic boons to support them between food assistance, rent assistance, non-taxed income, or medical assistance. And that’s absolutely true and the reason we need all of those things is that because currently it costs more hours of someone’s life to exist in American at minimum wage than they can afford. Welcome to generational poverty.

You can go to college and rake up about 10,000 hours of your life in debt. Hope you get a good enough job to pay that off, because that probably comes with a few dozens hours of life in interest every month. Again, we’ve established the cost of one hour of life from a human is $5.80 — this is how much we value one hour of human life and maybe now you can start to understand how insanely barbaric our system really is.

The reason we got here today is because our economic system is designed to exploit workers and funnel money up. This happens with union busting, tax breaks, and pseudo-monopolies. It happens with turn-over model profit schemes. It happens with folks making less than $100,000 doing everything in their power to believe hard work will get them somewhere, because to believe otherwise is to accept you’ve been fucked your entire life. The fact is your level work, the amount of work you put in, doesn’t equal the output. A person working overtime at McDonalds every day for a year put in backbreaking labor to maybe earn 2 hours of life per hour they put in. The wealthiest of us earn several millions of hours of life because of investments and interests they do very little to nothing with.

And while a person can definitely ruin themselves through personal agency, a person cannot will themselves into success. There is a reason we highlight success stories, because they’re so few. There are hundreds of folks who put in 80 hours a week to gain the same fame as Charlie or Mr. Beast. Folks who are likely as good, but just through luck didn’t make the same breaks. And that isn’t to say Charlie or Mr. Beast aren’t amazing, don’t deserve what they’ve earned, it is saying that to believe this system is a linear system of put in the work and get the reward is a fallacy we see repeated for hundreds of thousands of people across all fields.

But at the end of the day it is also about values more than anything. I personally believe that a persons life should be worth more than $5.80 an hour. We don’t need full on socialism to recognize maybe our current capitialistic system is maybe very very exploitative and harmful to not only the individual but to our society at large. When we create more wealth for labor, create more opportunities for our investments, more ability to grow as people, we create a population that is better equip to handle the difficulties of our current age. We give room for more people try science or inventing or philosophy better technology or ideas. We benefit as a society when we value people and we lose when value individuals.

So, if nothing else, take away from this, that human life is worth more than $5.80 an hour. Approximately 3.5 million dollars will buy you the entirety of a human life after age 18. Jeff Bezos can buy approximately 57,000 human lives right now at minimum wage. If we fight for $15 an hour, he’ll only be able to buy 23,500. That’s something right?