First what we do know. According to government statistics, the Gross National Product (GNP) of the United States, the totality of all the goods and services produced in this country in one year, is currently about ten trillion dollars. The GNP of all the rest of the nations of the world is only about thirty trillion dollars, which means that the United States economy generates about 23% of the gross product of the entire world.

GNP is clearly not a measure of the actual wealth of a nation. But it does have some bearing on the latter. The GNP of a nation is at least in part produced by the fixed assets of that nation. Thus, if we can get an idea of the value of the assets of the United States, we might be able to use these GNP figures to extrapolate the value of the assets of the entire world.

Considering that the GNP of the United States is about 23% of the entire output of the world, it should be safe to assume that the wealth of the United States cannot be less than about 15% of the value of everything in this world, even though the United States has no more than 5% of the world's population and occupies only about 6% of the total land mass of the world.

We can get at least a rough sense of the value of everything in the United States. There are mainly two types of assets that account for most of this country's wealth - its real estate, including housing, and its businesses. A very large proportion of all the businesses in this country are publicly traded corporations and their value is determined almost daily by the stock markets.

All told, the market value of all publicly traded corporations in early '97 is about twenty four trillion dollars. The value of all businesses in this country cannot be more than double this amount, or fifty trillion dollars.

We can also estimate with reasonable accuracy the value of all the housing in this country. The total number of "households" in this country is just over ninety million. The average cost of a single family house is close to one hundred thousand dollars. People who do not live in one family homes live in quarters that are on the average less valuable than the average single family home. Hence, the total value of primary residences in this country is not more than the product of the number of households times one hundred thousand, or less than ten trillion dollars.

There is of course much other real estate - second homes, shopping areas, office buildings, farms, public lands, and so on. However, a good deal of the improved land, including substantial portions of the housing stock, is owned by publicly traded corporations or businesses, whose value has already been considered. My guess is that the market price of all the other real estate in this country, including that owned by governments, is not greater than two or three times the ten trillion dollars that the primary homes are worth. At thirty trillion dollars, the average price of a single acre with improvements is a bit over thirteen thousand dollars. Considering that most land is not improved and that a good deal of land in this country has very low value, if anything, the average figure appears to be an overestimation of the true average value of all land.

Of course, there exist many other assets, private and publicly owned, besides real estate and businesses. We have not considered the value of automobiles, furniture, bank accounts, and the like held by individuals. Nor have we considered the value of items held by not-for-profit organizations, such as museums, or national treasures held by the federal government. However, including all these items will not add a tremendous amount of money to the total. So far, the upper limit of the value of the two items considered is eighty trillion dollars. Other types of assets do not at all approach the size of this figure. For example, money funds that do not invest in the stock market have total deposits of less than a trillion dollars. There are only 500 million cars in the entire world. Even at ten thousand dollars per vehicle, the total value of them all is only five trillion dollars. It is thus very likely that the total value of everything in this country does not exceed 100 trillion dollars. At such a total value, the average stake of each person in this country, man, woman and child, is $400,000. Certainly, this figure is not an underestimation of their actual worth.

Turning to the rest of the world, we can use the figures that have just been found and the earlier GNP figures for making an estimate of its worth. If we assume a value of 100 trillion dollars for the United States, then based on what was determined earlier, the rest of the world cannot be worth more than about six times as much, or no more than an additional 600 trillion dollars. Hence, the total market value of all the assets of this planet cannot exceed one quadrillion dollars. Hence, the entry of this data item appears on the trillion page.

It can easily be shown that even 700 trillion dollar figure is surely a gross exaggeration of the value of all the assets of earth. At 700 trillion dollars, the stake in the assets of the world of every man, woman and child on this planet would be $110,000. Considering that a very large proportion of people on Earth live in abject poverty, with virtually no assets to their name, this figure must surely be high even when their share in public property is considered.

Another way of looking at it. The number of acres of land on the globe is around 29 billion. For the value of entire globe to be 700 trillion dollars, on the average, every single acre of land with all that is on it would have to be worth about $24,000. Surely this is far more than its true average value.