A reason to go to Mars

--- In spacesettlers, john jones wrote:

> Yip-ee!! Just becouse the avrage person will be a
> millionaire dose not mean that they will have a better
> standred of living or be able to aford to go to the
> doctor. The avarge person will still get the shaft
> becouse people will need to be able to say they are
> better off than somebody else. While I personally hope
> that goverment will spend the money to end seirous
> poverty, I do not see that happening.

I don't mean "the average person will have a hundred times
as much money as the average person today, but because of
inflation everything will cost a hundred times as much, so
it's all the same."

I mean even counting inflation, the average person in the
first decade of the 22nd Century will have the buying
power of a millionaire of today. Own more than one home,
or have a lot of hand-crafted art. This is how I had
Anzu put it:
We followed her into her living room, where I could smell
incense burning. Once again I admired the furniture, much
of it hand-crafted. Botilda's place is a bit bigger and
fancier than mine, because her family is richer than mine.
And since the issue of relative wealth has come up...

There's something I've been hesitant to mention, because I
don't want it to seem like I'm bragging, or trying to put
you down somehow. I'm not, but what I'm about to write is
a very important difference between living in your time
and living in mine.

We're richer than you are.

I don't mean necessarily that I am personally richer than
you personally are, and I sure don't mean that everybody
alive today is richer than everybody in you time. But in
general, we're richer than you are.

There's nothing unusual about this. You're richer, on
average, than people in the 1800's. Again, the richest
tycoons of the Nineteenth Century were richer than the
poorest in the year 2000, but on average, you're richer.
And we're richer than that. The constant rising standard
of living has brought us to a level of wealth that makes
the average person today a millionaire by your standards.
I'm not saying that figuratively, and I'm not
exaggerating: the average person of today is a
millionaire.

Of course, it can be difficult to compare buying power
between groups (people living in 2000 and people living in
2109) who are each capable of buying things that the other
is not. You can't buy real estate in an Island Three,
because it doesn't exist yet, and I can't buy real estate
in Kiribati, because that entire nation is now under the
Pacific Ocean.

It can also be difficult to compare when things cost much
more or much less in one time than in another. For
instance, while it would be possible, in theory, for me to
buy gasoline, it would almost be cheaper to buy gold.
Most of you don't balk at buying a few litres of gasoline,
while for me it would be a major expense. Then again, how
much would it cost you to buy a mink coat? If you are a
person of average wealth in Europe, Japan, Australia or
North America, and you suddenly found yourself in
Mendocino Island, with your current level of wealth, you'd
find it easy to buy a mink coat. It just doesn't cost as
much as it used to.

And of course there is inflation. It doesn't do any good
to say that the average person today has X times more
money than in 2000 if everything costs X times as much.
That means that the two average guys are the same.

Except they're not. The economists who juggle numbers and
figure these things out have ways of taking all of this
into account, and when they've finished doing all that, it
turns out that what I said is true: the average person of
today is a millionaire by your standards. My parents are
millionaires, and I'll be a millionaire as soon as I finish
college and get a good, professional job.

We're dead average. Botilda's family is above average, but
you have to be the your-time equivalent of a billionaire
before you're thought of as unusually wealthy.

Again, please understand that I'm not telling you all of
this just to say `nyah, nyah, I'm richer than you are.'
But if you are going to understand what the life of an
"average girl" is like, you have to understand what
"average" means.

OK, with that out of the way...

We went up the stairs and out the door to the terrace, with
its small swimming pool. The pool looked inviting on this
warm November day.

Bret looked even more inviting.