That's not at all the argument I'm making, and probably isn't an argument made by anyone. Going from dirt-poor to richest-in-the-world is much harder than any other economic jump. My argument was simply that "the richest don't stay the richest" for very long. If you take $330bn and spend $1m a day (getting no interest on the principle) it would take 1,000 years to spend it all. You'd expect that the money would last the Rockefellers for centuries, but in fact it's pretty quickly been "returned" to the central money pot.