Having recently read that the world bank cited in 2017 that the world’s GDP was $80,934,771,028,340 (just over 80 trillion dollars), we thought we would do a few thought experiments to see what could be done with it. Apart from the first option, which would actually make the majority of people on Earth better off and drag the poorest out of extreme poverty, these sums are are just for fun and are in no way an indication of what we would do with the money.

The obvious place to start is to see what each person would get if it was all shared out equally. We can in fact just use simple numbers and nice get a simple answer here - firstly we round the worlds GDP to $80 trillion and the world’s population to 8 billion, then we divide the GDP by the population to get $10,000 per person. In reality, more than half of the world’s people earn far, far less than this, and a tiny percentage of people earn literally more than a million times more than this, but $10,000 per person is what it would be if it was all shared out equally.

The British pound coin weighs 8.75 grams. If the world’s GDP was turned into these coins, using a rough 10-year average exchange rate of 0.7 GBP per USD, there would be 56,654,339,719,838 (56.65 trillion) pound coins, which would weigh 495,725,473 tonnes or a total of 82,620,912 male African Savanah elephants. The numbers get even more astronomical when we line up all 56 trillion plus coins end to end (23.43mm per coin), we get 1,327,411,179 kilometres – the equivalent of just over 33,123 times around the Earth’s equator!

But how many cars that would buy? In 2019 the world’s best-selling car was the Toyota Corolla (also known as the Auris), selling 1,482,932 units. In 2021, Toyota.co.uk are pricing their base model at £28,325, so the world’s GDP could buy 2,857,361,730 Toyota Corollas. That’s 2.8 billion cars or 1 Toyota Corolla for approximately every 1 in 3 people on Earth. However, what about if everyone decided that we would buy as many Porsche 911 instead and run a lottery to who got them… well using a Porsche 911 Carrera S base model price of $113,000, there would be 716,236,911 (700+ million) porches up for grabs – which would mean nearly 1 in 10 people on Earth would be driving around in one of the most respected driving cars of all time.

The people of Hong King are the biggest spenders when it comes to their groceries, spending an average of $5,002 per year on food. So, 16.18 billion people could have a year’s worth of groceries in Hong Kong, or in other words, every single person on planet Earth could eat as much as they possibly could, twice over. Infact with an average wage of around $2,400 per month, or $28,800 per year, which is just over 17% of wages on groceries. To put that in perspective the people in the US spend an average of 6.4% of wages on groceries, compared to the people of Nigeria spending a whopping 56.4% of their wages on groceries.

The average cost of renting an apartment in the US is $1,124 per month. This means that 6,000,502,003, or just over 6 billion people could theoretically live in an average US apartment. 4.4 billion people could afford to live in an apartment and eat like a person from Hong Kong, but if they did, 45% of the world would be hungry and homeless. And no-one would be able to afford any Toyota Corollas.

When it comes to global money, the scale of the numbers are beaten only by theoretical mathematicians and astrophysicists. It can be difficult to get your head around them, but just remember, there is a certain amount of money and although it is not finite over time, what exists at the time of counting - is what exists at the time of counting and that is the size of the pot – and the more one person has of it, the less someone else has…