Brad De Long is hearing voices, and they are talking about the distribution of wealth.

Agathon: “That means that the market system, in weighting utilities and adding them up, gives you a much lower utility than it gives Richard Cheney. In fact, if marginal utility of wealth is inversely proportional to the square of lifetime wealth, the market system gives Richard Cheney about 400 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sick.”

Agathon: “And it gives Bill Gates a weight about 400,000,000 times as big a weight as it gives you.”

Glaukon: “That’s sicker.”

Agathon: “But it gives you about 40,000 times the weight it gives your average Bengali peasant, who thus has about 1/16,000,000,000,000 the amount of the market system’s concern as Bill Gates has. Will you teach that?”

There are 10E14 cells in the human body. You shed more cells every few moments than 1/1.6E13th. Good thing those cells can’t hijack a plane.