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Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by ttoinou on Thursday July 27, 2017 @03:04PM (#14868348)
You can also give decent salaries to a lot of African people with the 10k difference between the 20K/year person and the 10K/year person... so what's your point :) ?
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by dahart on Thursday July 27, 2017 @03:35PM (#14868640)
So you just answered your own question. The absolute difference is worth a lot more. It's better to have the $1.5B difference between Bezos and Gates pay Africans than it is to use the $10k between our two people in poverty, even though one makes more than the other.

Your suggestion to use log scales hides that fact, and shows the ratio of $20k to $10k as visually larger than the ratio between $92.3B and $90.8B. That is why log scales are counter intuitive and not great for physical analogies. You asked, I answered.

Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by ttoinou on Thursday July 27, 2017 @03:51PM (#14868802)
We couldn't even put all people on the same linear scale if we wanted to ^^ . It would look like : almost everyone at the bottom, and some people at the top. So yeah, it would be obvious then that the only money we could take is located at the top points.
Re:Jeff Bezos Surpasses Bill Gates as World's Richest Person by magic_beans on Thursday July 27, 2017 @04:15PM (#14869026)
Nitpicking but... Africa is a big continent, with a great deal of nations, and a large variety of income levels, with some of those incomes much higher than yours.