Life Span, Poverty, and the Moral Imperative to confiscate $13 trillion from billionaires

by Hank Pellissier

I reside near Sausalito, a charming, wealthy town in Northern California where the average human lifespan is a generous 92 years. In Ross, a smaller, wealthier hamlet 9.6 miles north of Sausalito, the average inhabitant can expect to see a birthday cake with 94 candles. Most amazingly, in the Sierra Nevada ski town of Mammoth Lakes 262 miles east, centenarians are as common as chipmunks. The average death registered here, claimed a US New & World Report article, is a Methusalean 98.9 years.

Nonegenarians are not the NorCal norm for everyone. A painful example of disparity is Marin City, a struggling community just 1.5 miles inland from Sausalito. People die here at the average age of 77.1, almost 15 years earlier than their nearby neighbors on the shoreline.

Globally, the Grim Reaper arrives decades earlier in vast regions, particularly in Africa. I’m the founder/director of the nonprofit Humanist Mutual Aid Network that provides aid in the Sub-Sahara. In Borno state, Nigeria, where our ultra-responsible regional coordinator Sadiq Modu Kura resides, the average life span for men is a meager 49.1 years.

I am tremendously grieved that this young man (Sadiq is 32) who is far brighter and kinder than I am, is scheduled by the circumstances of his location to perish before I do. At 72 years old, I can expect to live another two decades. Sadiq, statistically, cannot.

Dying at 49 years of age would have cruelly interrupted the best years of my life. My first child, Tallulah, would have only been 1.5 years old, still in diapers, just beginning to speak. My second child, Zenobia, would not yet be born. Death at 49 would mean I never enjoyed my vacations in India, Thailand, Slovenia, Costa Rica; I never experienced my haphazard employment as preschool director, comedy teacher, NYTimes columnist, and think tank manager; I never devoured the thousands of delicious meals, books and films or enjoyed the thousands of wonderful conversations with my wife and friends. None of that would have happened because I’d be worm food.

I don’t want Sadiq to die in mid-life. He is a valuable person loaded with skills and kindness. I don’t want to find out via a WhatsApp message from his cousin that Sadiq died of malaria, diarrhea, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or other diseases. I want Sadiq to live on and on, like I do in my pampered life. I want him to have grandchildren, societal success, dreams fulfilled, peak experiences.

Why is Sadiq, due to his address, destined to die before 50? Why do Marin City occupants die 15 years earlier than their Sausalito neighbors just 3,000 meters down the road? The answer is Money. Specifically, not enough of it. This is, in my opinion, a very fixable problem.

Perhaps many readers are familiar with Peter Singer’s 1972 essay titled, Famine, Affluence, and Morality written when he was 26 years old. Singer posed a moral question: he asked us to imagine ourselves on a walk, wearing new shoes. Suddenly, ten yards ahead of us, we see a child drowning in a pond. As physically capable adults, we can easily save this child’s life, with no risk to our own welfare except ruination of our foot gear. Singer believed the vast majority of us in that situation, with an opportunity to safely save someone’s life, would do exactly that.

Singer claimed the pond emergency and the response it required, is analagous to the 1971-74 catastrophe of nine million Bengali refugees in India suffering and dying due to civil war, genocide, malnutrition, famine, cyclones, flooding, and multiple lethal diseases. He believed humanity should quickly fund raise and donate the necessary cash ($720 million) to save all the lives of the threatened Bengali (death toll estimates were as high as 3 million). Singer viewed the Bengali situation as similar to the boy drowning in the pond because the lives could be saved with only small sacrifice to our own well-being (just $13 from each UK resident). It’s true there were many Bengali, and they lived 10,000 miles away, but those differences, Singer believes, are irrelevant. We can save the Bengali, he insisted, and not saving them is equivalent to ignoring the screams of the child drowning, because we don’t want to muss up our shoes.

This essay you are reading here seeks to extend Peter Singer’s extrapolation. My contention is this: people in Borno state, Nigeria, like my friend Sadiq, who are destined to die 40-45+ years earlier than silver-haired or bald Californians, die because people who could extend their lives don’t want to mildly inconvenience themselves.

Life span is closely correlated to income. Sausalito residents enjoy a per capita income of $97,500. Marin City dwellers, collapsing 15 years earlier than Sausalitans, earn considerably less, just $52,019. The 86 percent difference is literally killing them.

Both these numbers dwarf African income. Borno State in Nigeria, where Sadiq lives, has a per capita annual income of just $698. Look at that number again. Do you see six hundred and ninety-eight dollars? If so, yes, you read it correctly.

Wealth enables people to live longer. Funds delivered to individuals can be used to obtain medicines, immunizations, doctor appointments, physical checkups, nutritious food, health education, hospital stays, clean water, housing improvements, stress reduction, and access to exercise opportunities. Money provided to responsible governments can improve medical education, facilities, and equipment, and elevate the doctor-to-patient ratio (in Borno State, Nigeria, the doctor-patient ratio is 1:2973; in Sausalito it is 1:683).

Extending the lives of people who die needlessly young requires a small bit of sacrificial generosity from lucky-to-get wrinkled onlookers at the pond. Ideally, it asks for global egalitarianism - a broad movement that reduces the planet’s wealth gap, redistributing funds obtained from the rich, to give to the poor. Robin Hood to the rescue.

Wealth redistribution categories include land reform, nationalization of resources and/or industries, progressive taxation, maximum and minimum incomes, and UBI (universal basic income). Reparations, free education, debt forgiveness, halting tax havens, taxing churches, and free internet access, can also help narrow the wealth gap. Dozens of economists have proposed wealth-equalizing ideas in the last 150 years; a prominent current proponent is Thomas Picketty, the French economist who authored Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Capital and Ideology, and A Brief History of Equality.

A Picketty plan picked up by USA politicians Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in recent years can be succinctly titled “No Billionaires.” Presently there are 3,028 billionaires in the world; together they own $16.1 trillion. This is more than the annual income of every nation except China and the United States.

Do billionaires need more than $1 billion each for their survival and comfort? Of course not. Allowing them to retain $1 billion is wildly generous, in my opinion. Do they need $100 million? Or $50 million? No. I have family members and friends with $30 million, and they absolutely don’t know what to do with it except die and pass it on.

If all of the 3,028 billionaires in the world got every dollar of theirs above $1,000,000,000 confiscated for public welfare, it would generate more than $13 trillion. If this treasure was used to prolong the lives of at-risk Sub-Saharan Africa, it would be transformative.

I asked an AI platform to allocate the $13 trillion for Sub-Sahara; it suggested $3-$4 trillion for health systems overall, $1.5 trillion for sanitation and clean water, $1 trillion for nutrition and food security, $1-$2 trillion for education and literacy, $1.5 trillion for energy and infrastructure, $1 trillion for climate and environmental resiliency, $.5 trillion for government, stability, and anti-corruption, $.5 trillion for job creation and social protections, $.2 trillion for medical research and innovation, and $.3 trillion for monitoring, evaluation and contingency.

Resulting benefits include:

  • Increased numbers of clinics and hospitals, especially in rural areas

  • Vaccination campaigns eradicating preventable diseases

  • Maternal & child health improvements drastically reducing infant and maternal mortality.

  • Hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, and community health workers receiving training

  • Local pharmaceutical manufacturing producing essential medicines and vaccines.

  • Wells, treatment plants, and sewage systems upgraded

  • Clean water delivered to all urban and rural communities.

  • Sanitation facilities in schools, homes, and public places to prevent waterborne disease.

  • Subsidized food programs for children and pregnant women.

  • Staple foods fortified with vitamins and minerals (iodine, iron, folic acid).

  • Female education initiatives to raise girls’ education levels (this correlates with higher life expectancy)

REMEMBER - our primary goal is life extension.. would these actions deliver that?

YES. Especially in Nigeria, where my friend Sadiq lives, along with 220 million others (in 371 different tribes speaking 520 different languages).

If just $1 trillion was allocated to Nigeria, the result, by 2050, would be a life expectancy of 75 years. Sadiq Modu Kura would outlive me, which is as it should be, I would die happy grinning with that social justice accomplishment. Every $1,000 invested in Nigerian health would produce 2.6 additional life-years, claims one estimate.

Sadiq in the few years I’ve known him has established a World Peace Internet cafe that offers free computer training and internet access to orphans, widows and refugees; he also set up an Ice Cream Factory, a Noodle Factory, and Grain Mill that employs women widowed by the terrorist group Boko Haram, he delivered food and medical aid to hundreds of people victimized by last year’s flood, he organized a community dinner for orphans, he provided blankets and housing for the orphans, and the same for a local IDP camp, plus a latrine, etc., etc.

May he please live on.

One last big number must be mentioned: 12 Billion Human Life-Years.

That number signifies an estimate of 10+ added years for 1.2 billion inhabitants in the Sub-Saharan.

Let’s return, now, to Peter Singer’s drowning child in the pond. Let’s imagine the sinking preadolescent is, instead, 1.2 billion people in the Sub-Sahara. Let’s imagine you and I are not walking by the pond, we are replaced, instead, by a mob of 3,028 billionaires, clutching all their cash in their hands except for $1 billion they kept elsewhere secured for themselves. Let’s imagine the billionaires do what Peter Singer suggested they’d do, what the Moral Imperative requires - the billionaires help all 1.2 billion people, by rewarding each with an additional decade of life.

You might sniff - it’s more complicated than that. But is it?

The drowning child in the pond analogy is, today, fully accepted as an accurate illustration of human moral duty to assist each other if it only requires a small inconvenience. My extension of this analogy is equally true, amirite?

Billionaires! To the pond! Twelve billion human life-years there! You can save them all!