Harry Potter's School Book Pack

But you cannot so easily rule out extreme variations with a different brand of quantities, to which we turn next. The Strange Country of Extremistan Consider by comparison the net worth of the thousand people you lined up in the stadium. Add to them the wealthiest person to be found on the planetБЂ”say, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Assume his net worth to be close to $80 billionБЂ”with the total capital of the others around a few million. How much of the total wealth would he represent? 99.9 percent? Indeed, all the others would represent no more than a rounding error for his net worth, the variation of his personal portfolio over the past second. For someoneБЂ™s weight to represent such a share, he would need to weigh fifty million pounds! Try it again with, say, book sales. Line up a thousand authors (or people begging to get published, but calling themselves authors instead of waiters), and check their book sales. Then add the living writer who (currently) has the most readers. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, with several hundred million books sold, will dwarf the remaining thousand authors with, say, collectively, a few hundred thousand readers at most ...»