What does “have access to” mean? There are >10^37 atoms making up human bodies. And dollars can buy physical stuff, and you might expect this to be somewhat weighted in PPP adjustments between now and the distant future.
I agree that it’s not quite clear how to interpret these things, but I don’t think it’s as nonsensical as you’re implying.
(thinking aloud a bit here) An analogy might be that Jeff Bezos has 78 organs. His net worth is $200bn. So there is $3bn of output for each of his organs. I just don’t know at what number it becomes implausible that his average organ could sustain a certain level of output. And this generally seems like a weird way to think about the limits on Bezos’ output. This seems structurally similar to the atoms point.
To push further on this… a natural response is to say “it only seems implausible that Bezos’ liver could have this economic value because you’re considering an organ in the abstract. But once his liver is combined with the rest of his Bezos and the influence he can have on the rest of the world, it stops being implausible”. This is true but then the same point applies to collections of atoms. I don’t know of a non-question begging way round this.
What does “have access to” mean? There are >10^37 atoms making up human bodies. And dollars can buy physical stuff, and you might expect this to be somewhat weighted in PPP adjustments between now and the distant future.
I agree that it’s not quite clear how to interpret these things, but I don’t think it’s as nonsensical as you’re implying.
Fair cop on the access to atoms numbers.
(thinking aloud a bit here) An analogy might be that Jeff Bezos has 78 organs. His net worth is $200bn. So there is $3bn of output for each of his organs. I just don’t know at what number it becomes implausible that his average organ could sustain a certain level of output. And this generally seems like a weird way to think about the limits on Bezos’ output. This seems structurally similar to the atoms point.
To push further on this… a natural response is to say “it only seems implausible that Bezos’ liver could have this economic value because you’re considering an organ in the abstract. But once his liver is combined with the rest of his Bezos and the influence he can have on the rest of the world, it stops being implausible”. This is true but then the same point applies to collections of atoms. I don’t know of a non-question begging way round this.